Berry beats Wicks to chart top spot

Mary Berry has toppled Joe Wicks in the book chart this week, ending the Body Coach’s eight-week stretch atop the Official Top 50 by a scant 125 copies. Foolproof Cooking (BBC) shifted 23,166 copies, doubling its volume week on week to rise five places, earning £290,449 through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. Lean in 15 (Bluebird) actually shifted an extra 232 copies on the week before, with 23,041 copies sold, but slipped to second place.

Foolproof Cooking was released at the end of January, hitting its previous high of second place in mid-February, 12,000 copies below Lean in 15 in number one. So far, it has shifted 89,742 copies and has now surpassed the £1m milestone, with a total of £1.2m earned to date. It re-takes the Hardback Non-Fiction number one— which it conceded a week ago to the Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups title How it Works: The Mum (Michael Joseph) — for a third non-consecutive week, for Berry’s 25th week total.

This is the second time a Mary Berry title has topped the chart, after 2014’s Mary Berry Cooks (BBC) held the number one spot for two weeks — also in the run up to Mother’s Day that year. It has gone on to sell 287,223 copies and is Berry’s most successful title to date. Though Mary Berry’s Absolute Favourites (BBC) held the Hardback Non-Fiction for a total of seven non-consecutive weeks in spring 2015, it never sold more than 14,000 copies in a week. This was possibly due to the accompanying BBC TV series not starting until May, two months after Mother’s Day.

How it Works: The Mum dropped into third place, but, like Foolproof Cooking, saw a dramatic rise in sales— it sold just a whisker under 20,000 copies, a 42.6% rise in volume week on week. Philippa Gregory’s The Taming of the Queen (Simon & Schuster) débuted in fifth place, wrestling the Mass Market Fiction number one from Katie Fforde’s A Vintage Wedding (Arrow). However, the bestselling new title last week was Jeffrey Archer’s Cometh the Hour (Macmillan), which outsold The Taming of the Queen by just 141 copies. It also took the Original Fiction number one from Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (Doubleday), for Archer’s 15th week in the top spot.
 
The ever-prolific James Patterson had three titles in the Top 50 last week, with Truth or Die (Arrow) entering the Top 50 in seventh place, hardback 15th Affair: Women’s Murder Club (Century) another new entry in 23rd and Private Sydney (Arrow) dropping to 41st after six weeks in the chart. Danielle Steele also saw her new paperback Country (Corgi) chart two places above Prodigal Son, which has been in the chart since its release in January. And 19 years after the release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Bloomsbury), the most successful literary series of all time isn’t going away; the Harry Potter Colouring Book (Studio Press) and its sequel Magical Creatures charted in the Top 50 alongside the 2014 edition of J K Rowling’s début, shifting a combined 14,994 copies between them.
 
Two editions of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (Arrow) charted inside the top 100 last week, following the author’s death on 19th February, in 60th and 91st place. In total, eight different editions charted inside the Top 5,000, for a combined 8,861 units. The trade paperback of companion title Go Set a Watchman (William Heinemann) shot up 40 places to 111th, while the hardback, which secured Lee’s first ever UK number one last July, climbed 679 places to take 139th place.