Nom goes on while Hoover leaves others for dust
Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom Comfort Food (Bluebird) has notched up its fourth UK Official Number One in a row and sixth non-consecutive top spot. This is the 30th week a Pinch of Nom book has been atop the overall chart, and the 43rd time one has conquered Hardback Non-Fiction.
With just over 23,000 copies rung through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, Pinch of Nom Comfort Food bested the next bestselling title by a factor of more than two to one—though this was a relatively slow week at the top of the charts with just three books chalking up more than five-digit unit sales. Sales were at £29.9m across the overall market, a 4.3% drop over the previous seven-day period and it was the lowest third week of January TCM haul since 2015.
TikTok-boosted US author Colleen Hoover pictured above had a blistering week, with four places in the Top 25, including two debutants: Reminders of Him (Montlake) hit 10th place and the re-released Verity was 16th. Verity was originally self-published by Hoover in 2018 and sold a respectable but not earth-shattering 11,900 copies in three years. Sphere acquired the books last year, published it e-book in December with the print launched last week. It sold half as many print units (6,020) last week as it did in the previous three years. Reminders of Him shifted 7,500 copies last week and while BookScan cannot give out retailer share it would be interesting to discover whether the sales were mostly through Amazon, or whether bricks and mortar shops were stocking the Amazon Publishing imprint title.
Meanwhile, It Ends with Us (Simon & Schuster, 10,964 copies) climbed to second place overall—Hoover’s highest-ever chart position—earning her a first Mass Market Fiction number one. Ugly Love (Simon & Schuster, 4,974) was in 21st place. All told, Hoover has sold £2.5m through BookScan since first being published in the UK in 2012, 85% of which has come since TikTokkers started raving about her in 2021.
S&S also held onto the Children’s number one with another TikTok beneficiary, Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End (3,586). Dr Michael Mosely’s Fast 800 Keto was even more resilient (Short, 7,779), retaining the Paperback Non-Fiction crown for the fourth consecutive week.
A familiar face returned atop Original Fiction as Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice (Viking, 4,806) regained the number one for the 16th time in the past 19 weeks, while Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise (Picador, 3,492) tumbled to second. A busy publication week for hardbacks, with 10 new entries in the Original Fiction top 20, led by a début cosy crime, The Maid (HC, 2,954), by Nita Prose, the somewhat on the nose pseudonym of Nita Pronovost, vice-president and editorial director at Simon & Schuster Canada.
