Monthly E-Ranking: Child first in line again

Lee Child has once again claimed the Monthly E-Book Ranking number one, with The Midnight Line selling a stunning 62,094 units in November and ousting Dan Brown’s Origin from the top spot. However, despite racking up the biggest seven-day e-book sales figure of the year—with 42,842 units in the week ending the 11th—The Midnight Line fell short of Origin’s 2017 monthly chart record by 3,000 units.

Charts behemoth Child has been going from strength to strength recently. Night School shifted a hefty 57,354 units in November 2016, and its hardback sales were dramatically up on that of its predecessor, Make Me. (Night School’s publication date was two months closer to Christmas than Make Me). Following suit, The Midnight Line has outperformed its prequel in “e” and “p”: in hardback, sales in its first four weeks were up 7.5% on Night School’s first-month volume.

Despite being on sale for just two days in the calendar month, E L James’ Darker claimed a  triumphant second place, shifting 35,272 units and beating Origin by well over 20,000 units. Though impressive, the latest entry in James’ Fifty Shades oeuvre is comparably impotent in both “e” and “p”. In 2015, the first title told from Christian Grey’s perspective, Grey, sold 359,756 e-books in its first month on sale, with a further 668,323 print sales taking its total past the million-copy mark. But with the Fifty Shades summer of 2012—the year the print books sold a combined 10.6 million copies—seeming very long ago now, even a blockbuster film trilogy and the continuing Christian companion series doesn’t seem to have kept the fire alive in the hearts of Fifty Shades fans. (It’s not you, Erica, it’s them.)

Darker’s late-November release date, an awkward time for a paperback fiction title to launch, may have hampered its print sales, and with the e-book market entering its pre-festive-season hibernation period—as stocking-filler puzzle books and £26 Jamie Olivers flew off the physical shelves—it wasn’t likely “e” would pick up the slack. Brandon Sanderson’s Oathbringer stormed into fifth, the fantasy author’s second appearance in the ranking, after Words of Radiance scored 25th place in March 2014. He is the highest-charting fantasy author this year, following strong showings from Ben Aaronovitch’s The Furthest Station and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Literary fiction with a sci-fi twist has had a stellar 2017, with The Handmaid’s Tale, The Underground Railroad and The Power all racking up multiple months in the chart.

T&Cs Date range: 1st–30th November 2018. 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. MNS = months in chart.