Big freeze hits World Book Day, but 'Brain Freeze' tops chart

Tom Fletcher and Shane Devries’s World Book Day title Brain Freeze (Puffin) has nipped into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, leapfrogging three-week wonder Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (Harper), with 37,879 copies sold through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market.

This is Fletcher’s second World Book Day number one, after his picture book title The Dinosaur That Pooped a Lot! (Puffin) with McFly bandmate Dougie Poynter and illustrator Garry Parsons. However, Brain Freeze, despite its topical title, is among the lowest-selling first-week World Book Day number ones in recent years, declining 28% in volume on The Dinosaur that Pooped a Lot! and over 60% down on 2017’s Blob by David Walliams. Brain Freeze is the first WBD number one since records began to fail to crack the 40,000 copies sold mark the week of the event.

Given Tom Kerridge’s four-week run in the top spot with Lose Weight for Good (Absolute), this is also the fifth week this year the number one had been claimed by an author called Tom—55% of 2018 to date.

Gail Honeyman’s debut was relegated to ninth place as eight of the 2018 World Book Day tranche surged into the top of the chart, with Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton’s Terry’s Dumb Dot Story (Macmillan Children's) in eleventh and Nadiya Hussain and Clair Rossiter’s Bake Me a Story (Hachette Children's) in 13th. However, the Beast from the East took a healthy bite out of total World Book Day sales—at 250,648 copies sold in total, the combined 2018 volume was 46% down on 2017’s. In fairness, 2017 was a particularly buoyant year, given the event’s 20th anniversary celebrations. But last week’s sales were also drastically down on 2016, declining 21%. This is the lowest total volume since the 2011 tranche, there were only six World Book Day titles per year, as opposed to this year’s 10—and those combined six sold a total of just 3,000 copies fewer.

Elsewhere, Jojo Moyes’ Still Me (Michael Joseph) reclaimed the Original Fiction number one from James Patterson’s 17th Suspect (Century), while Eleanor Oliphant…, Lose Weight for Good and Joe Wicks’ The Fat-Loss Plan (Bluebird) held on to their category number one spots for a sixth, eighth and tenth week respectively.

Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (Particular) bounded back up the Top 50 and into third place in the Hardback Non-Fiction top 20, as the sequel Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2 (Timbuktu Labs)—filed as a children’s title—took third place in the Children’s Non-Fiction chart, below WBD titles Marvel Avengers: The Greatest Heroes (DK Children) and Bake Me a Story. Its average selling price of £20.31 put its value at £66,095, making it the most valuable kids’ title of the week.

World Book Day usually boosts the market's total weekly volume, but the snow took its toll: week on week, volume dropped 5.4% to just over three million books sold. This was the lowest seven-day volume of the year to date, and 22% down on the same week in 2017. World Book Day week has not seen a total volume this low since 2002, when it dipped below the three million mark.