No ordinary Joe: Body Coach surges to number one

“New year, new you” started early this year, with Joe “The Body Coach” Wicks muscling into the top spot in the last official week of 2015.   

Personal trainer and Instagram star Wicks’ Lean in 15 lunged into the Official Top 50 number one spot, shifting an endorphin-inducing 77,097 copies for £581,185, according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, the pole position for Pan Macmillan’s new lifestyle imprint, Bluebird.  

Lean in 15 outsold the previous week’s number one, How it Works: The Husband (Michael Joseph), by nearly 68,000 copies, and Lean in 15’s volume— achieved over five days—was the highest by any title in six weeks, beating even the Ladybird Book for Grown-Up title’s week as Christmas number one. Only charity picture book Mog’s Christmas Calamity by Judith Kerr (HarperCollins Children’s) has sold more copies in a single week inside the last six months.

Though last week ended on 2nd January, it officially closes BookScan’s 2015 after 53 weeks, the extra seven day period added to recalibrate the calendar and make historical and future comparisons more accurate.

The extra week merely adds to what has been the first year on year rise in the print market since 2007. Almost 10m more print books worth £117.7m were sold in 2015 compared to 2014, the market’s first year on year rise in value terms since 2007. Last week £25.7m was rung up through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, bringing the total to £1.51bn for the 53 weeks ending 2nd January, a 8.4% rise on last year.

In volume terms, 190.6m books were sold through the TCM in 2015, a shallower 5.6% rise on 2014.   

Wicks is the first début author to hit the top spot since Jane Hawking’s Travelling to Infinity (Alma) went to number one in May 2015, and the first Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery title to top the chart since Ella Woodward’s Deliciously Ella (Yellow Kite) in January last year. Lean in 15’s first five days of sales puts it inside the Health, Dieting & Wholefood category’s top 20 bestselling titles of all time.

Though Wicks’ number one was 35% up in volume on How it Works: The Husband a week ago, the rest of the Top 50 suffered the expected post-Christmas sales drop. The Harry Potter Colouring Book (Studio Press) rose four places to second but dropped 57% in volume week on week, shifting 15,060 units, and Jeff Kinney’s tenth Wimpy Kid title Old School (Puffin) jumped into third place, holding the Children’s number one for a second consecutive week and selling 13,389. The biggest-selling non-fiction title of 2015 in volume terms, Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom (Batsford), leapfrogged 14 places to take fourth, shifting 11,753 units.

After weeks of the big Christmas titles jostling for position inside the Top 50, last week saw a plethora of new releases hit the chart, with 15 titles launched in the seven days. Besides Wicks, the other big healthy title was Amelia Freer’s Cook. Nourish. Glow., the wellness blogger’s first book with Michael Joseph after her previous title launched the revamped Harper Thorsons list in 2014. Freer’s book shifted 7,089 copies to hit 17th place.

Yet almost every other new title was paperback fiction, with Richard and Judy’s Book Club titles descending en masse into the Top 50. Laura Barnett’s The Versions of Us (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) hit ninth place and secured the Mass Market Fiction number one, with 8,430 copies sold, and Debbie Howells’ The Bones of You (Pan), Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood (Vintage) and Rosamund Lupton’s The Quality of Silence (Piatkus) charted inside the top 30. Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins (Black Swan)—announced yesterday as the Costa Novel Award winner— shifted 8,069 copies and took 14th place, pre-announcement.

Renee Knight’s Disclaimer (Black Swan) and Kate Hamer’s The Girl in the Red Coat (Faber & Faber), both tipped as the new The Girl on the Train (Doubleday), also had strong first-week sales in paperback—although Paula Hawkins’ original is still riding high in the charts in hardback, taking the Original Fiction number one for a fifth consecutive week. Hawkins closed out 2015 with 25 Original Fiction number ones in BookScan’s 53 weeks.   

Julia Donaldson’s Stick Man (Alison Green), which was adapted for the BBC’s Christmas Day line-up, entered the Top 50 last week in 38th place. Released in 2009, it is the oldest book in the chart and only one of two titles not released in 2015— the other being Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom, which came out in August 2014.