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Fantastic Scholastic: Suzanne Collins helps publisher bag a record return
With sales of just over £1.5m, Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins has single-handedly earned publisher Scholastic its biggest week since 2007, according to the latest data from Nielsen BookScan Total Consumer Market (TCM).
Scholastic’s previous all-time weekly high coincided with the release of The Golden Compass film, which helped boost Philip Pullman’s sales to just over £900,000 for the publisher, and taking the children’s specialist to a total of £1,489,158 overall, in the week before Christmas in 2007.
Collins second Hunger Games prequel earned its £1.5m on total sales of 118,428 units; chuck in Collins’ backlists £94,653 and a further £305,716 from Dav Pilkey, Scholastic is the highest-earning publishers of the week with a revenue of over £2m.
Sunrise on the Reaping’s first-week volume total made it only the second book, alongside Rebecca Yarros Onyx Storm (Piatkus), to surpass sales of more than 100,000 copies in 2025, a feat both books managed in their first week of sales. Collins initial Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was released in the first lockdown of 2020 and so comparable sales figures aren’t available, but it is likely that as physical bookshops were closed for the first, this latest instalment has surpassed its predecessors sales figures although we do know The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes took the top spot for one week on publication in May 2020.
The biggest title in last week’s Official UK Top 50, The Strawberry Patch Pancake House by Laurie Gilmore (HarperCollins), sees sales drop 47.6% to 13,549 copies, but it’s enough to take second place and hang onto first in the Mass Market Fiction (MMF) chart, just ahead of Ann Cleeves’ The Dark Wives, which has seen a slight rise of 2.6% this week.
There are some more significant changes in the Original Fiction (OF) chart with last week’s number one Faithbreaker by Hannah Kaner (HarperVoyager) dropping out of the Top 20 altogether, shedding 86.2% of its launch-week sales.
Instead, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Dream Count (Fourth Estate) returns to the top spot despite also seeing volume sales fall 28.8% to 4,407 units.
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The top of the Hardback Non-Fiction (HBNF) chart sees positions one and two swap around as Donna Ashworth reclaims the crown from the Hairy Bikers with her latest poetry collection, To the Women (Black & White). Ashworth’s newest rose 7.4% by volume, while The Best of the Hairy Bikers (Seven Dials) fell 47% to 5,040 copies, just 30 copies ahead of third placed Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Macmillan) which has seen sales jump 76.9% in its second week on sale.
The highest new entry belongs to Michael Morpurgo’s Spring (Hodder), Morpurgo’s first adult non-fiction title in 40 years interested 3,184 customers in its first week bouncing it into fifth place on the HBNF chart.
Gary Stevenson’s The Trading Game notches up an eighth week in first place on the Paperback Non-Fiction chart with sales trading up 10.7% compared with the previous seven days to 5,743 units just 342 ahead of this weeks highest new entry, second-placed The Next Conversation by Jefferson Fisher from Penguin Business.
The first book from Fisher, who has 5.9 million followers on Instagram, has sold 5,401 copies, despite the 300-page volume having a hefty RRP of £16.99.
Despite huge numbers from Suzanne Collins, total TCM volume has fallen 2.8% this week to 3.3 million, although the value jumps 1.2% compared with the previous seven days. Compared with the same week in March 2024, volume is down 2.5% while value has risen 2%.
