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Delia’s cooking on gas in April's digital list
Delia Owens’ weepie novel Where the Crawdads Sing topped the digital chart in April, with signs showing sales in the format were growing with the UK in lockdown.
April’s top 50 e-book bestseller chart clocked in at a combined 340,137 books sold, a 12% bump in volume on the previous month. February was 20% up on January, but that rise wasn’t sustained in March’s volume, which was roughly level with February’s—though both months represented unusually high levels of sales for e-books.
Of course, the chart only features titles supplied by publishers to The Bookseller, with a price restriction of £1.99, so it can only give us a broad view of the market. But it does seem the lockdown, beginning in late March and continuing in its first iteration throughout April, did boost sales of e-books. With bricks-and-mortar stores closed, print books only available to buy in person from supermarkets, and online retailers suffering from delays in the postal service, self-isolated Brits turned to digital for an instantly available slice of escapism.
Only two months across 2019 racked up bigger combined digital volumes than April 2020, and both of those (September and October) were topped by much-awaited “event” titles—Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and Adam Kay’s Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas, respectively. In contrast, April’s number one, Delia Owens (pictured) and her historical weepie Where the Crawdads Sing, didn’t shift an eye-wateringly huge amount in April. Its 22,284 units sold was the second-lowest volume for a digital number one title in 2020, and only two number ones in 2019 posted lower volumes. But e-book sales looked to have improved across the board, with two more books shifting in excess of 10,000 copies compared to March; and the 50th-bestselling book, at 3,445 units sold, was up 504 units ahead of its month-on-month predecessor.
March’s number one, Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, dropped to sixth in April, perhaps because suddenly commute-less Cromwell fans plumped for the 900-page doorstopper of a hardback instead. Across lockdown, new and shiny releases have been sidelined slightly across the book market, without bookshop-based events taking place. E-books were not immune from this—Where the Crawdads Sing was released in the UK in 2019. Dawn O’Porter scored two books in the top five, with The Cows, originally published in 2017, and So Lucky, published in 2018, in second and fifth respectively. Lee Child’s Blue Moon bounced back up the chart as its paperback was released.
Beth O’Leary’s The Flatshare, which reigned atop the Bookstat e-book top 10 for much of April, was ineligible for the Monthly E-Book Ranking as it was priced at 99p. However, her follow-up The Switch made its début in 34th place.
The instant-buy, one-click nature of the e-book meant topical books were rife. Peter May’s Lockdown débuted in 17th place, while Chris Atkins’ A Bit of a Stretch—a memoir about his time in prison, apparently relevant to locked-down book-buyers in April—climbed into the top 15.
Date range 29th March–25th April 2020
Titles with a digital list price of less than £2 are excluded. Participating publishers: Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Bloomsbury, Simon & Schuster, Faber Factory, Canongate, Walker Books and Bonnier Zaffre.
