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Fire and Fury trumps Kerridge to claim number one
Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury (Little, Brown) has blazed into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, ousting Tom Kerridge’s Lose Weight for Good (Absolute) and selling 41,202 copies for £620,851, according to Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market. Though Donald Trump’s least favourite book dropped in volume by 30% week on week, Kerridge’s diet book fell harder, shifting half what it did a week ago.
Though Fire and Fury’s average selling price has declined a little from its enormous £17.30 a week ago, its £15.07 puts it in rarified company: only three number one bestsellers have racked up a £15-plus a.s.p. before—Jamie Oliver’s Happy Days with the Naked Chef and 30-Minute Meals (Michael Joseph), and Michael Palin’s Sahara (Orion). None have done so in the first six months of the year.
Despite Lose Weight for Good’s drastic drop, it held a strong second place, in the face of an impressive leap by Lee Child’s short story collection No Middle Name (Bantam), which improved 29% in volume on its first week on sale, achieving 25,277 copies sold.
Aside from Fire and Fury burning into the Hardback Non-Fiction number one position, all category number ones stayed the same from the week before—with Kimberley Chambers’ Life of Crime (HarperCollins) locking down a second week in Original Fiction top spot, No Middle Name again clinching the title of Mass Market Fiction number one, Joe Wicks’ The Fat-Loss Plan (Bluebird) gaining a fourth week in the Paperback Non-Fiction pole, Paul Moran’s Where’s the Unicorn (Michael O'Mara) cantering into another week atop the Pre-School chart and David Walliams’ Bad Dad (HarperCollins) good for an eleventh week as the Children’s & YA Fiction number one. Once again, Chambers was the only female chart-topper—the last time more than one woman scored a category top spot in a single week was the first week of October 2017, when Rupi Kaur’s The Sun and Her Flowers (Andrews McMeel) rose to the top of Paperback Non-Fiction while J K Rowling and Jim Kay’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury Children's) claimed the Children’s number one.
“New year, new you” titles are still flocking into the chart, with Jordan B Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life (Allen Lane) the highest new entry into the Top 50, joining The 4 Pillar Plan (Penguin Life), The 4-Week Body Blitz (Bantam) and, of course, Oliver's 5 Ingredients among numerically-titled non-fiction hits. Rupy Aujla’s The Doctor’s Kitchen (HarperThorsons) also charted in 23rd.
Liz Braswell’s alternate-universe Disney titles—which re-imagine Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin—leapt en masse up the Children’s and YA Fiction chart, and were joined by Serena Valentino’s Disney Villain series. However, even with two fiction series in the top 20, Disney couldn’t out-number David Walliams—they racked up six titles in the chart, compared to the comedian-turned-author’s seven.
The print market dropped on the week before, with value down 5% to £26.3m. But year on year, value was up 2.5% and volume up 1.7%. Weekly value is yet to drop below £26m in 2018, a feat not achieved since 2011.
