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Nathan Anthony’s Slow Cooker leads a strong start to 2025
Nathan Anthony leads a slimmed-down Top 10 as he returns to the top spot with Bored of Lunch: Six Ingredient Slow Cooker (Ebury Press). It is the third year in a row that Anthony has topped the charts during the first week of the year, despite this latest offering being published at the beginning of December 2024.
According to data from Nielsen Bookscan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM), sales in the Top 10 have dropped a third compared with the previous seven-day period. This is expected due to the phasing of the last days of Christmas, but year-on-year volume sales have fallen 36%, nearly exclusively down to the differing in Anthony’s number ones: he sold 74,727 units in the first week of January last year but can only manage 15,473 copies in his fifth week on sale.
The latest instalment in the Bored of Lunch series is one of 12 Non-Fiction titles in the Top 50 that concentrates on healthier minds and bodies as the nation’s focus shifts following the festive period. The biggest new release of these is from Dr Rangan Chatterjee whose Make Change That Lasts (Penguin Life) debuts at the top of the Paperback Non-Fiction chart, selling 11,350 copies.
Chatterjee is one of just three books to sell more than 10,000 units in the first week of 2025 with A Language of Dragons by SF Williamson (HarperFire) making its first appearance on the charts at second place in the overall top 50 – just 807 copies off the top spot.
In what is fast becoming a January tradition, James Clear’s perennial bestseller Atomic Habits (Random House Business) returns to the top 10 while Pinch of Nom: All in One (Bluebird) from Kay and Kate Allinson rises to eighth place after first hitting the top spot back when it was initially released at the end of November.
You would be forgiven for thinking that Young Adult fantasy debut soaring straight to the top of the charts is due to one of the subscription boxes, but on this occasion, traditional bookselling has won out with Williamson being strongly supported across Waterstones with a special signed exclusive edition.
It is the biggest title in the children’s chart this week, selling twice as many as second placed Dav Pilkey’s Big Jim Begins (Scholastic). The only other new releases that trouble the children’s chart this week are paperback editions of Jeff Kinney’s No Brainer (Puffin) and Jamie Smart’s Bunny Bonanza (David Fickling) with only the former making a mark on the total top 50.
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It is a quiet week for new releases in fiction with last week’s overall number one Butter (Fourth Estate) – written by Asako Yuzuki and translated into English by Polly Barton – experiencing a 63.2% drop in sales and falling to fifth place in the UK Top 50, though it retains its place at the top of the Original Fiction Top 20 on 9,895 copies.
The biggest new release here is from Danielle Steel whose latest Never Say Never (Macmillan) shifted 2,056 units. One new fiction launch that made a splash is the paperback edition of Jennie Godfrey’s popular debut The List of Suspicious Things (Cornerstone) making an impressive mark on the charts, taking seventh place overall. It is not quite enough to claim the coveted first place in the Mass Market Fiction chart, falling 718 short of Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital (Vintage) which bags the number one slot for the eighth week in a row.
While most books have seen a week-on-week drop in sales in the last seven days, Rebecca Yarros is bucking the trend with both Fourth Wing and Iron Flame (Piatkus) increasing 14% ahead of the release of the third book in the Empyrean series later in January.
The first chart of 2025 sees a week-on-week drop in volume of 26.7% to 3.5 million, with a larger decline in value of 32.3% to £32.5m. Despite this, volume sales perform pretty well year-on-year, up 2.6% compared to the same week in 2024 with value up 1.3%.
