Weekly E-Ranking: It's always Darker before the Dan

EL James’ Darker has once again roped in the Weekly E-Book Ranking number one, with the title spending a fifth consecutive week at the peak. It makes the Fifty Shades sequel the longest-running number one of 2017, and at the eleventh hour (though Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale racked up six weeks at number one across two months in the summer).

This week (ending 30th December) was a prime one for savvy price positioning, what with all those brand new Kindles unwrapped on Christmas Day and 2017’s e-books of the year all jostling to be downloaded first. Jane Harper’s The Dry, the crime e-book of the summer, re-emerged from the £1.99 zone to rack up a 20th week in the ranking. It also featured in many newspapers’ books of the year round-ups, perhaps nudging new e-reader owners into taking the plunge.

Autumn’s beefiest hardbacks—including Robert Harris’ Munich, Ken Follett’s A Column of Fire, Michael Connelly’s Two Kinds of Truth and Marian Keyes’ The Break—were also all present and correct, and noticeably cheaper than their print editions. Mandasue Heller’s Save Me was the highest new entry, in third—the author’s best chart position to date. Fellow crime writer Robert Crais made his Weekly E-Book Ranking début in 14th place with Wanted, and there was also an inaugural outing for Rosie Lewis, whose foster-care memoir Broken hit 19th place.

Though wildly different in subject matter, the chart’s three non-fiction hits (Broken, Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens) all have a similar stranger-than-fiction, “What is the world coming to?” narrative appeal. Very 2017-appropriate.

David Walliams made his once-a-year appearance in the weekly ranking, with Bad Dad—fresh from its 2017 Christmas Number One victory in print—following in The Midnight Gang’s 2016 footsteps and charting in the post-Christmas top 20. Presumably, the proportion of children downloading books to their new Kindles is at a higher
rate during the Christmas holidays than at any other time of the year.

Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage also rose two places, though its success in e-book format to date can probably be attributed to His Dark Materials’ first-wave 1990s fans, now adults, rather than actual children.