Monthly E-Book Ranking: Special Kay defeats festive stalwart Child

Adam Kay’s Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas once again claimed the Monthly E-Book Ranking number one in December, with 26,885 units sold.

During most booksellers’ favourite season, usually there isn’t a lot of crossover between the print charts and the e-book rankings. In fact, they can become near mutually exclusive, with print cookbooks, David Walliams-authored kids’ novels and celebrity memoirs flying off the shelves and landing under swathes of Christmas trees. 

E-books are likely to have a more muted December, with book-buyers so focused on funnelling their cash into gift-buying. Yet in recent years seasonal e-book hits have emerged, including festive-themed romantic fiction and Agatha Christie-inspired retro crime fiction—boosted by the recent spate of Christmas- scheduled television adaptations.

It’s not often a book can reign in both the print and e-book charts across December. Kay’s festive follow-up to This is Going to Hurt — the title that has topped the Weekly E-Book Ranking more than any other — was of course one of the bestselling Hardback Non-Fiction titles through Nielsen BookScan’s TCM over the Christmas period. But it has also racked up three months atop the digital chart, too. 

E-book buyers who were already fans of Kay’s This is Going to Hurt were more likely to opt for the e-book edition, and it perhaps picked up a few more readers among junior doctors who had just been given their December shift rotas. But what certainly helped its digital sales was its much lower price. While the print edition has an r.r.p. of £9.99, the e-book has been priced at £2.99 since publication. Essentially, Pan Macmillan had separate strategies for Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas’ hardback and e-book, and it’s paid off.

The man who is accustomed to being the sole author straddling e-book and print, Lee Child, hit second place with Blue Moon. The latest Jack Reacher is always guaranteed to sell strongly in both “p” and “e”. Since 2016, when the date for Child’s annual hardback release was moved from September to November, it has become the fiction gift of choice at Christmas.

However, clearly some Reacher fans are too impatient to wait for their Christmas stockings, as the e-book always flies off the digital shelves as well. But in 2019, while the hardback sold better than ever before—it racked up 10 straight weeks as the Original Fiction number one, beating Child’s previous personal best of seven—the e-book hasn’t dominated as strongly as usual, finding itself blocked from the digital charts’ top spot by Kay. Maybe the scales are finally tipping in print’s favour for the Reacher books.

Date range: 1st–31st December 2019. 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.