Slim pickings: Wicks, Kerridge lead New Year, New You charge

British book buyers awoke in January from their collective holiday hangover/food coma and embraced "New Year, New You" tightly, with 12 titles in last week's UK Official Top 50 in the healthy eating, fitness and personal development space, led by Joe Wicks' latest chart-topper.

Wick's Veggie Lean in 15 (Bluebird) sold just over 22,000 units through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market last week to earn Wicks his 17th overall number one and his 68th Paperback Non-Fiction pole position. This follows a significant week for the Body Coach as he closed out 2018 by eclipsing the £25m and 3 million-unit sales marks through BookScan. Veggie Lean in 15's 22,000-unit haul is a 35% jump week-on-week in volume, but it does represent the lowest-selling first week of January number one in five years. No fault of Wicks': for his newest title, Bluebird tweaked the schedule to release the book two weeks before Christmas instead of the week after. It was a clever move, with Veggie Lean in 15 selling 76,000 copies in the fortnight before Christmas and arguably shifting public perception to the title being viewed as both a gift-giving opportunity and a New Year, New You title. It will be interesting to see if other publishers follow suit and will move some of their big January health and personal development books to a mid-December publication date this year.

Tom Kerridge, the big January star of the last two years, also had a good week. His Tom Kerridge's Fresh Start (Absolute) shifted just under 17,000 copies, leaping 134% in volume sales and moving from 27th to fourth place overall, earning the Michelin-starred chef his 17th Hardback Non-Fiction number one. Kerridge's £4m/£400,000-unit bestseller of 2018, Lose Weight for Good (Absolute), also popped back into the top 50, in 46th place. 

The other New Year, New You titles joining Wicks and Kerridge in the top 50 included Michael Moseley's The Fast 800 (Short, 10,301 copies), Dr Rangan Chatterjee's The Stress Solution (Penguin Life, 8,335), Ruby Wax's How to be Human (Penguin Life, 3,330) and Rukmini Iyer's The Green Roasting Tin (Square Peg, 2,938), the last of which is a July 2018 release that has received a big retailer push in the last two weeks.   

Of course, book buyers were not focused entirely on self-improvement; some were thinking about murder (perhaps after spending the holidays with in-laws). In its second week of paperback release, A J Finn's psychological thriller The Woman in the Window (HarperCollins) sold 18,432 copies to give the American author his first Mass Market Fiction number one, edging out Heather Morris' The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Zaffre, 17,417). Sally Rooney has two reasons to celebrate this week: her Costa Novel of the Year nod for Normal People (Faber) and the book holding on to the Original Fiction number one for the second straight week, selling just over 4,000 copies. Jeff Kinney was back as the Children's number one with The Meltdown (Puffin, 9,146), which he last achieved in the title's launch week in early November.         

Despite the relatively low numbers for Wicks' chart-topper, the print market as a whole did not do too shabbily: full-market TCM sales were at £27.3m, a 3.8% jump on the first week in 2018.