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Weekly E-Ranking: James leads new quartet at summit
EL James’ print sales may be eye-popping but the digital market is truly where she’s queen of all she surveys. Though Fifty Shades of Grey’s record-smashing summer pre-dated The Bookseller‘s e-book charts, follow-up Grey sold a whopping 359,756 units in its first month on sale in June 2015. For context, only one other Monthly E-Book Ranking number one has sold more than 200,000 units in one month, and that was Sylvia Day’s Grey-alike Entwined with You. Darker, released in November 2017, may have had a slower start, but it still managed to shift 35,272 units in the three days between its release on the 28th and the end of the month.
The Mister soared effortlessly into the Weekly E-Book Ranking number one spot, in the same week it shifted 52,674 copies in paperback to claim the print number one. It was a strong week for new entries: Helen Fields, who has twice topped the weekly digital list with her DI Callanach series, zipped into second place with Perfect Crime.
Fellow crime writers David Baldacci’s Redemption and John Connolly’s A Book of Bones also débuted in the top five, with Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me scoring ninth place. The trio appeared in the reverse order in the Original Fiction top three for the same week. The heatwave may have caused print sales to fall, but in “e”, crime titles in particular looked to benefit. This chart, encompassing Good Friday and the Saturday of the bank holiday weekend, featured 10 crime titles, with a resurgence for Robert Galbraith’s Lethal White, out in paperback that week. Cara Hunter’s In the Dark also joined its DI Adam Fawley series predecessor, Close to Home, in the top 20.
However, romance was out in force too. Erica James joined her romance-writing compatriot and near-namesake E L James in the chart with Swallowtail Summer, and Jojo Moyes’ Still Me continued its strong sales, charting in the top 20 for a 28th week in total.
Week ending 20th April 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.
