Weekly E-Ranking: Good comes from evil for Carter

While the very top of this Weekly E-Book Ranking will look familiar—E L James’ The Mister dominating in the pole position for the third straight week, Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt appearing for the 68th time, the last 53 of which have all been in the top 10—the changes have also been rung, with seven newbies and two titles returning after long absences.

Chris Carter leads the way for the débutants, hitting third place in the same week his Hunting Evil claimed the Original Fiction number one. Each of the crime writer’s last three titles also débuted in the ranking in their first week on sale, with 2017’s The Caller hitting a personal-best second place. Hot on his heels is self-publishing superstar turned Avon hot property Mel Sherratt. The Stoke-on-Trent author’s Tick Tock is her second book with the HarperCollins imprint, and appears in our ranking for the first time—although if we had unfettered access to self-publishing data, she would certainly have been here before: she claimed to have sold more than 1.5 million e-books as an indie author.

Madeleine Miller’s Circe returns to the ranking after an absence of a little over a year after receiving a boost following a Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlisting. Kate Morton’s The Clockmaker’s Daughter is the other re-entry, hitting the chart for the first time since September 2018, helped by an uplift in marketing around the mass-market paperback release.

Morton’s publisher, Pan Macmillan, had a decent week of it with six spots, its second-best weekly total; it had eight titles in the ranking in the week ending 11th November 2017. Two of the authors in that eight-spot week—David Baldacci and Lucinda Riley—are also feature here, while there is new blood in the form of Neal Asher’s latest space opera The Warship, and rising saga star Elaine Everest. Everest’s titles are set during or immediately before or after the Second World War, and revolve around workplaces, such as The Woolworth Girls and this week’s The Teashop Girls. She has published six books since 2016 and they have shifted 214,000 print copies through BookScan.

Week ending 4th May 2019. 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, Bonnier Zaffre & Canongate.