The Mum’s net gains fail to topple Wicks’ Lean In tower

Joe “The Body Coach” Wicks has held the Official Top 50 number one spot for an eighth consecutive week, selling 22,809 copies for £189,888, according to Nielsen BookScan. Lean in 15 (Bluebird) has now shifted 455,597 copies and made a total of £3.5m since its release in the last week of December.

Only seven titles have held the number one spot for more than eight consecutive weeks since records began—and only one of those, Guinness World Records 2008, has sold fewer than one million copies. E L James’ Fifty Shades of Grey (Arrow), with a run of 18 weeks, may be comfortably ahead, but Wicks only has to hang on for another three weeks to beat the longest-running J K Rowling title, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Bloomsbury), which racked up 10 weeks in 2001.

Wicks aside, the Top 50 saw a shift away from “new year, new you” titles, with Deliciously Ella: Every Day (Yellow Kite), Dr Michael Mosley’s The 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet (Short) and Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive (Canongate) dropping in volume, and Mother’s Day gift purchases soaring upwards. The newest addition to the Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups series, How it Works: The Mum (Michael Joseph), jumped into second, taking the Hardback Non-Fiction number one from Mary Berry’s Foolproof Cooking (BBC Books). Its volume increased 25.8% on its first week in the chart, as other titles in the series, How it Works: The Husband and How it Works: The Wife dropped back after a brief Valentine’s-induced boost.

In two weeks The Mum has managed to sell a quarter of the total volume to date for the least popular (or maybe just misunderstood by the mainstream) Ladybird Book for Grown-Ups title, The Hipster. However, it still has a way to go to beat frontrunner The Husband, which has sold 282,255 copies since last October.

Katie Fforde’s A Vintage Wedding (Arrow) rose to third, displacing The Martian (Del Rey) as Mass Market Fiction number one and selling only 400 fewer copies (13,559) than The Mum. Dilly Court’s Ragged Rose (Harper) and Jenny Colgan’s The Little Shop of Happy-Ever-After (Sphere) also entered the top 10. Parenting blogger Sarah Turner’s The Unmumsy Mum (Bantam) had a good second week, rising nine places to 20th and jumping 12% in volume week on week.

The half-term holiday last week also saw a boost for Children’s titles. David Walliams’ Awful Auntie (HarperCollins Children’s Books), now in paperback, swiped the Children’s number one from Costa Book of the Year, The Lie Tree (Macmillan Children’s), after being denied by the Frances Hardinge title a week ago. Awful Auntie jumped into 10th place overall, selling 8,526 copies to secure Walliams’ 57th week as Children’s number one. Despite being relegated to second, The Lie Tree continues to perform well; its volume dropped by only 600 copies on the week before and it maintained 16th place in the Top 50.

Both Jeff Kinney’s current Wimpy Kid hits, Old School in hardback and The Long Haul in paperback (both Puffin), rose up the chart, and Dr Miranda MacQuitty’s Kids Only (NHM) sold 6,062 copies to chart in 23rd place. The children’s guide to the Natural History Museum habitually enters the Top 50 during school holidays; expect it to drop straight back out again next week, at least until Easter.

Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (Doubleday) has once again taken the Original Fiction number one, racking up a total of 29 weeks atop the chart. With one book, Hawkins has now beaten Dan Brown’s 28 weeks in the top spot across all his titles. Though the debut crime author still has a way to go to beat Martina Cole, at 60 weeks, and James Patterson and co-authors at 55, she is closing in on Original Fiction veteran Patricia Cornwell, who has a total of 31 weeks at number one, across seven titles. There are still a several more weeks to extend Hawkins’ run as The Girl on the Train mass market edition is due to be published on the 5th May.

Amazingly, last week saw The Girl on the Train drop below 4,000 copies sold in a week for the first time, over a year since its release in January 2015.  Its highest weekly volume to date was 30,077 copies sold, in the week leading up to Christmas.

After Harper Lee’s death was announced last week, five different editions of To Kill a Mockingbird charted inside the Top 5,000, selling a combined 4,004 copies—impressive given the announcement came on Friday, meaning the sales rises would have been mostly achieved in one day of sales. The 2010 50th anniversary edition won out against the 2015 edition, shifting 1,642 copies and jumping 298 places. The trade paperback of Go Set a Watchman (William Heinemann), which was released on 11th February, charted eleven places higher, selling 1,722 units.