A Hot Mess at the top of the charts: Jeff Kinney returns to the summit after five years
It’s all change at the top of the UK Top 50 this week with a total of nine new entries inside the top 10 according to Nielsen Bookscan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM). Leading the charge of these new entries is Jeff Kinney’s Hot Mess (Puffin) débuting straight at number one.
The 19th instalment in the Wimpy Kid series brings Kinney his first overall pole position since 2019’s Wrecking Ball – but sees a slight decline on last year’s No Brainer of 0.9% to 37,750 units. With a difference of just 346 copies, it’s a number that could easily be made up next week especially considering the slightly later phasing of the October half term this year.
It’s a different story for another children’s behemoth, David Walliams, as his latest offering Super Sleuth (HarperCollins, illustrated by Adam Stower) can only find its way to number nine in the overall top 50. This is the first time since 2012’s Ratburger that Walliams’ autumn offering hasn’t taken the top slot on first asking, but perhaps more notable is a year-on-year decline of 50.6% with sales of 9,513 – a far cry from the author’s peak when The Ice Monster delivered first week sales of 111,057 in November of 2018.
In second place in the overall top 50 this week is In Too Deep (Bantam) the 29th Jack Reacher title from Lee and Andrew Child. In a pattern we’ve seen several times for big brand authors so far this autumn, this is down 8.5% against last year’s The Secret but it’s enough to secure the brothers the Original Fiction number one – the 56th time a Jack Reacher title has achieved this.
The Striker by Ana Huang (Piatkus) takes third place in the UK top 50 and number one in the Mass Market Fiction chart. Huang has shifted a million copies of her spicy contemporary romances since the beginning of 2023 and shows no signs of slowing down with her sports-based love story scoring sales of 15,612 – her highest single week performance to date.
At two on the MMF chart is The Christmas Cottage by Sarah Morgan (HQ), which sees a 3.4% volume drop compared to 2023’s The Christmas Book Club, but a value rise of 5.3% thanks to a £1 increase on the r.r.p. Morgan takes eighth place in the overall chart, the only other paperback aside from The Striker to make it into the top 10.
The highest Non-Fiction entry this week is Jeremy Clarkson’s latest Diddly Squat book Home to Roost (Michael Joseph). The story of another year on Clarkson’s farm harvests sales of 11,891 and takes fourth position, just a few hundred units ahead of Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders (Viking) – lifetime sales of which tick over 250,000 this week.
Not far behind that is The Hairy Bikers: Our Family Favourites (Orion) completed by Si King following Dave Myers’ death earlier this year is part cookbook, part tribute to Myers and has brought the pair sales of 11,335 – 160% ahead of 2023’s Ultimate Comfort Food. New entries from Nancy Birtwhistle and Alexei Navalny complete this week’s top 10.
Last year’s Christmas number one, Murdle (Souvenir), takes the crown in the Paperback Non-Fiction chart, with sales of 2,695 – some way ahead of the paperback edition of Prince Harry’s Spare which only interested 1,809 people, perhaps because everyone read the hardback edition when it was released to record-breaking sales in January of 2023.
In total the TCM recorded 3.8 million books going through the tills this week up 5.8% against last week with the total value also rising 3.7% to £36.3m. Volume is down 5.5% versus the same week last year with value down 6%.
