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The Star Wars Expert Guide blasts into number one spot
The Star Wars Expert Guide (Dorling Kindersley) has rocketed into the Official Top 50 number one spot, according to Nielsen Bookscan’s Total Consumer Market. It sold 30,400 copies and pulled in £97,855, as part of a Tesco special offer with the DVD of “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens”.
This is Dorling Kindersley’s first overall number one in the Nielsen Bookscan era, and the second Star Wars-related title to hit the top spot this year (after Cavan Scott’s World Book Day title The Escape: Star Wars (Egmont) took the title in the first week of March). The Star Wars Expert Guide is also the first Children’s Non-Fiction number one since Minecraft: The Official Handbook (Egmont) in April 2014.
It is the first supermarket deal tie-in title to hit the number one in 2016, after John Pearson’s The Profession of Violence (William Collins) and Andy Weir’s The Martian (Del Rey), both offered for free by Sainsbury’s along with the DVD of their respective film adaptations, separately missed out on the top spot to Joe Wicks’ blockbuster Lean in 15 (Bluebird). Last year, Jane Hawking’s autobiography Travelling to Infinity (Alma) took the number one position as part of a Sainsbury’s offer with the DVD of Stephen Hawking biopic “The Theory of Everything”.
The DVD release of the UK’s most successful film of all time last week also helped to boost Alan Dean Foster’s novelisation Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Arrow), which climbed into the top 100, selling 2,084 copies. Where’s the Wookiee Search and Find (Egmont) was not far below, shifting 1,932 units.
Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling (Black Swan) slipped to second place, selling 19,235 copies. After “Shakespeare Saturday” took place on 23rd April to mark the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as a Stage (HarperPerennial), originally released in 2008, shot into the Top 50 in 32nd place. The highest-charting title actually written by Shakespeare was Macbeth (Oxford University Press), in 715th place, with the obligatory colouring book Escape to Shakespeare’s World (Puffin Classics) only a few places behind, in 734th.
Another new entry, Robert Galbraith’s Career of Evil (Sphere), charted in third and displaced David Lagercrantz’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web (MacLehose Press) as the Mass Market Fiction number one. The third Cormoran Strike title’s hardback took the Original Fiction number in October 2015 and has gone on to sell 80,848 copies to date. Last spring’s Galbraith paperback, The Silkworm (Sphere), rose into the overall top spot in its second week on sale, so Career of Evil may still move upwards.
The Girl in the Spider’s Web dropped into fifth, falling below Lean in 15. Despite maintaining fourth place for a second week running, the clean-eating cookbook was once again the most valuable title in the Top 50, for a fifth week in a row. At £136,624 earned, it was the only title in the entire chart to pull in more than £100,000.
David Baldacci took the Original Fiction number one, with his latest Amos Decker title The Last Mile (Macmillan) selling 4,188 copies. This is a first for the crime author, despite racking up a total of six weeks atop the Mass Market Fiction top 20. Parenting blogger Sarah Turner held the Hardback Non-Fiction number one with The Unmumsy Mum (Bantam) for a second week running.
