The Audible Audio Download Chart August: Fry continues to sizzle as Kay climbs

Stephen Fry’s birthday is in August, and the Audible chart for that month seems to have been aware. Fry’s Mythos boomeranged back into the Audible Audio Download Chart monthly top spot, displacing Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. It is Mythos’ fifth month in the top spot overall, and since its release in November 2017, it is still yet to fall to a place lower than second in the chart.

The magic of Fry’s dulcet tones also saw Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone bounce upwards, finishing in the top three for the first time since July 2017. August was the fourth consecutive month that the Harry Potter seven charted in its entirety, and the series climbed to register its best collective performance since January last year. School summer holidays in August no doubt helped the Audible chart’s only reguarly-charting Children’s titles to a boost in sales.

Fry also narrates Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive Collection, which was released in February 2017 and spent most of the spring last year atop the Audible chart. In August, it leapt two places to seventh.

Now that Fry-authored or narrated titles—45% of August’s chart—have been covered, we can look at what else is happening. August’s top 20 was curiously low on Adult Fiction titles—especially in the top 10, where five non-fiction texts faced off against just three fiction titles (one of them being the aforementioned Sherlock Holmes).

Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt hit the overall print number one for the first time in August, 20 weeks after its publication in paperback. It also spent most of the month topping the Weekly E-Book Ranking, usually flanked by Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Kay’s stunning rise of eight places in the Audible chart, recording its highest position of second, meant it was surrounded by audio non-fiction: Manson’s The Subtle Art..., Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and Ant Middleton’s First Man In. The burgeoning "angry young men" trend seems to be manifesting itself most noticeably in male-listener-dominated audio form.

In fact, the Audible ranking is one of the few charts in The Bookseller that Eleanor Oliphant hasn’t topped in the past six months—though The Tattooist..., which swiped its first Monthly E-Book Ranking pole in July, surged seven places. The début title has posted months of steady sales across formats, and its paperback publication on 4th October looks set to push it into the stratosphere.

Two non-fiction titles joined the chart in August—Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and Rob Moore’s Start Now, Get Perfect Later—as did just a single fiction title, Joanna Cannon’s Three Things About Elsie, which claimed 20th place.