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Guinness takes Christmas number one and sets record for lowest-selling festive chart topper
Last Christmas Murdle by GT Karber (Souvenir) dominated the bestseller charts in December making it a shoe-in for the Christmas number one – but it cannot quite replicate Wham’s two years on the trot success in the music charts, instead settling for sixth place this year according to data from Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).
Instead, the honour of 2024’s Christmas number one goes to the Guinness World Records 2025 which makes it to the top spot by just 1,900 copies. While the team behind the annual collection of record-breaking feats will be celebrating selling 43,630 books in the last full week before Christmas, this is the lowest-performing festive number one since records began, just slightly behind 2022’s number one – Guinness World Record 2023.
Booksellers across the country will know that a year with Guinness at the top – this is its fifth time in the Christmas number one spot – is symptomatic of a Christmas with no runaway successes. While critically acclaimed fiction titles such as Butter (Fourth Estate) and Orbital (Vintage) have experienced bumper Decembers, the big brand titles have had less than stellar years.
Guinness itself has more or less matched its 2023 performance – down just 2.1%, the equivalent of less than 1,000 copies – while the Private Eye Annual 2024 takes seventh place in the overall UK top 50 with sales of 24,073 down 8.8% versus the same period in 2023 but up 17.2%, compared with the previous week this year.
The Christmas charts have traditionally been the home of celebrity biographies and cookbooks, but in 2024 the bestselling biography – Miranda Hart’s I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest with You (Michael Joseph) – only makes it to 11th place overall, while the king of Christmas number ones – Jamie Oliver has had six festive chart-toppers since 1998 – only makes it to 14 with Simply Jamie.
This year’s Christmas number two is Richard Osman with We Solve Murders (Viking) – after a relatively slow start, the cosy crime behemoth has seen 41,370 books go through the tills this week, a 13.4% increase on the previous seven-day period and up 7.1%, when compared with Osman’s 2023 offering. To date, the launch title of Osman’s new series has sold just under 440,000 copies, some 90,000 less than The Last Devil to Die sold in the same period in 2023.
At this point we should point out that the timing of Christmas this year means that the week we’re comparing to is two days further away from the big day itself, meaning that year-on-year numbers in next week’s chart will likely show some high percentage numbers. For example, Osman’s sales in 2023 dropped to just 8,963 in the last week of the year, but with three pre-Christmas days still to report, you can expect that number to at least double.
It has been a good year for fiction with four titles inside the top 10 this year, compared to just two in 2023. Samantha Harvey’s Orbital takes the top spot in the Mass Market Fiction chart – and third place in the overall top 50 – with 39,369 copies, a week-on-week rise of 20%. The Booker winner has undoubtedly been the biggest seller in indie bookshops this Christmas, topping the indie bookshop chart for the last six weeks.
Another indie bookshop success – massively boosted by its pick as Waterstones Book of the Year – is Polly Barton’s translation of Butter by Asako Yuzuki, which takes fifth place in the overall top 50 with a 30% rise in sales, bringing in sales of 34,586 copies.
Sandwiched between Butter and Orbital is this week’s biggest selling Non-Fiction paperback – expect your Christmas Day to feature questions from The 1% Club quiz book (Bantam) based on the ITV series of the same name – sales have risen 31%, putting it just a handful of copies behind third place Orbital.
Murdle is just behind it in 6th place with a massive 93% rise in sales week-on-week – but a 64% drop in sales compared to the same week last year. Not that the either Karber or his publishers will be complaining though, the same edition of a book appearing in a festive top 10 two years running is impressive enough, but this latest week of sales means that the crime-based puzzles have now sold more than half a million copies since publication.
Dav Pilkey and Jeff Kinney retain their positions at the top of the Children’s chart with Big Jim Begins (Scholastic) and Hot Mess (Puffin), respectively, but sales have dropped a little compared to the previous seven-day period meaning they both drop two places to take the last two places in this week’s overall top 10.
The overall book market follows a similar pattern to the top 10 – volume sales have risen 14.3% to 8.7 million books through the tills bringing in a total of £89m up 14.3%, but compared with last year, volume sales are down 2.3% and value sales have dropped 3.6%.
