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Love is in the air (fryer): Jamie Oliver is number one for second week running
It is a static top three in Official UK Top 50 as Jamie Oliver’s Easy Air Fryer (Michael Joseph) keeps hold of the top spot for a second week in the latest data from Nielsen Bookscan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).
In total, the chef’s sales dropped 56.8% to 15,469 copies but managed to stick to the top spot as runner-up The Crash by Frieda McFadden (Poisoned Pen) and third-placed Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros (Piatkus) both also experienced week-on-week drops of 41%.
It is a fallow week for new releases as the highest new entry to the Top 50 is a re-entry for Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram’s Guess How Much I Love You? (Walker) – this hardback edition of the 1994 classic was first published back in 2014 but has seen its biggest weekly sales come in the last few months topping 6,000 units in October and December 2024, and again for a third time this week.
In the run-up to Valentine’s Day, the title reached the top of the children’s chart with sales of 6,273 units, managing to beat last week’s number one – Big Jim Begins by Dav Pilkey (Scholastic) – by a slender 552 copies.
The biggest new release in the children’s chart is the first of 2025’s World Book Day books – Carl Anka and illustrator Amanda Quartey’s The Magic Balloon (DK Children’s) with 2,126 copies through the tills already.
The highest “new” release in the charts this week is a reissue of Lee Child’s Persuader (Transworld) – the seventh Jack Reacher thriller was originally published back in 2003, but has been repackaged with a TV tie-in cover to mark the upcoming third season of Reacher starring Alan Ritchson. With 4,535 copies sold, it is just 176 units ahead of the truest new title – Ali Hazlewood’s Deep End (Sphere).
Hazlewood’s seventh novel makes it to 26th position in the latest TCM data with sales of 4,359 copies, though it is significantly down on previous title, Not in Love, which sold 9,178 units in its first week in the summer of 2024. It is worth noting that the new title has been published outside the normal fortnightly release schedule so supermarkets who supported the book previously may not be promoting it yet – a theory supported by an average selling price of £9.08 – more than £3 higher than Not in Love’s first week.
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With the latest data from Nielsen running up to Saturday, 9th February, there are still some big Valentine’s Day-inspired sales to come in the coming week, so Hazelwood’s latest is one to keep an eye on.
The other big news in the Mass Market Fiction chart is Coco Mellors’ Blue Sisters (Fourth Estate) which has risen into fifth place in the overall Top 10 thanks to a spot in Waterstones Book of the Month promotion. Mellors’ sisters will be far from blue with a 60.1% increase in sales volume to 10,226 copies – taking their total sales to 16,626 units, a 33.4% increase compared with the first two weeks of Cleopatra and Frankenstein, published in paperback in February 2023.
It is a bit of a fiction paperback takeover this week representing 22 of the top 30 titles of the week, but Non-Fiction is not completely absent from the charts with Gary Stevenson’s The Trading Game (Penguin) refusing to compromise at the top of the Paperback Non-Fiction charts. Sales have risen 17.1% compared with the previous seven days to 8,262 – more than double second-placed colouring book Girl Moments, from independent publishers Coco Wyo.
A total of 3,138,987 books were sold across the TCM this week – a drop of 4% week-on-week, but an almost identical number to the week before that. Sales were worth £29m, a drop of 3.8%, versus the previous seven days.
Year-on-year, volume was down 2.1%, but thanks to a 20 pence increase on the average selling price, value figure saw a rise of 0.2%.
