Super Thursday titles fail to set the charts alight

Super Thursday titles have failed to ignite the Christmas gift-buying period so far this year. David Walliams and Adam Stower’s The Blunders (HarperCollins) claimed the UK Official Top 50 number one last week, after debuting in third place the week of its release, but posted the author’s lowest number one volume for a title debuting in the top spot at 19,269 copies. As yet, no Super Thursday title from this year’s crop has shifted more than 20,000 units per week, though Dilly Court’s A Thimble for Christmas (HarperCollins) has needled into the Mass Market Fiction number one twice.

The week of Super Thursday on 12th October saw the new releases blocked from the top spot by Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die (Viking), and though the market rose 6.3% in volume and 4.9% in value week on week, it declined 8.2% in volume and 3% in value against the same week in 2022.

Last week’s print volume fell 12.3% in volume and 6.3% in value year on year, with this month the first October since 2019 selling under four million books each week. Average selling price is still eye-wateringly high enough that value isn’t tanking, but volume is struggling – only one week since July has it improved year on year, and then only by 0.05%.

The last few years has since the publishing industry resting on its laurels for the Christmas period, relying on former Christmas number one authors like Walliams, who the book-buying public is no longer snatching up off the bookshop shelves in droves. Hence, the last two Christmas number ones have been Pinch of Nom: Comfort Food (Bluebird), a diet book aimed at the January market, and Guinness World Records 2023 (GWR), the market’s most dependable festive seller. But there’s still time for new life to breathe into the 2023 Christmas gift-buying period: Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman in Me (S&S) could prove less than toxic to the market, while Alice Oseman’s fifth Heartstopper title (Hodder & Stoughton), due to be published in early December, may be perfectly poised to become the first graphic novel Christmas number one.