Fire and Fury sets UK e-book chart ablaze

Fire and Fury may have missed out on the print number one last week, but after a shortage of hardback copies in bookshops over the weekend, readers hungry to learn all about Donald Trump’s McDonald’s habit turned to the digital shelves. The book, described as “really boring and untruthful” by its subject, blazed into the Weekly E-Book Ranking number one spot, ending E L James’ five-week run in the top spot with Darker. It should be noted that the weekly e-book chart runs a week behind the print data, and this chart covered the week ending 6th January. So Fire and Fury achieved the number one spot with just two days’ worth of e-book sales.

Like the print edition, which was flying off the shelves for an average selling price of £17.30, Fire and Fury’s digital list price of £13.99 is a whopper. Non-fiction number ones are rare in the e-book chart, but none have cost more than £4.99, and while three titles have hit the number one spot with a £16.99 price tag, they were all hardback fiction releases from big brand authors—Jeffrey Archer’s This Was a Man, Peter James’ Need You Dead and, most recently, Ken Follett’s A Column of Fire. Tom Kerridge’s Lose Weight for Good also made the top 20, a surprise for a hardback cookbook—the ranking saw neither hide nor hair of Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients last autumn, as it racked up over 800,000 print sales. Kerridge, who drew level with diet-guru rival Joe Wicks (both men have peaked in fourth place in the digital chart), gave Fire and Fury no real competition for the number one spot.

The weekly ranking has been bitten by the “new year, new you” bug more noticeably than it was last year. Along with Kerridge, Rangan Chatterjee’s The 4 Pillar Plan—which recommends an “electronic sabbath” once a week for all-round health, though presumably not while you’re reading the e-book—charted 13th. In the midst of Dry January, Clare Pooley’s The Sober Diaries also hit the top 20, with fiction titles The Dry and The Thirst also doing particularly well. Coincidence?

Misha Glenny’s McMafia was boosted into the top 20 following its BBC adaptation’s début on New Year’s Day, zipping into ninth place. Its print edition jumped 205% in volume in the same week. The ranking has been curiously lacking in film tie-ins recently, with Murder on the Orient Express the last to chart, back in the autumn.

T&Cs: Data is for week ending 6th January 2018. Titles with a selling price below £2 are excluded, as are titles priced £4.50 or below with any print versions priced above £17.99. Participating publishers: PRH UK, Hachette, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Bloomsbury, Simon & Schuster and Bonnier. WKS = the number of weeks in chart. DLP = digital list price.