Walliams smashes personal best as The Beast reigns again

David Walliams’ The Beast of Buckingham Palace (HarperCollins) has racked up record single-week sales for the author, selling 130,073 copies for £886,333 through Nielsen BookScan’s TCM in its first full week on sale. 

The Beast of Buckingham Palace, illustrated by Tony Ross, already looked like a dead cert for the Christmas number one (dependent only on how the Pinch of Nom sequel Everyday Light (Bluebird) performs straight out of the gate) but now it’s possible that it could improve on the Christmas number one sales of Michelle Obama’s Becoming (Viking), which in 2018 hit a record of 116,920. Walliams' record sales this week are 15.4% up on his previous biggest-selling week, scored by Bad Dad in 2017. 

Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse (Ebury), crowned Waterstones Book of the Year last week, sold 37,388 copies, rising 86% week on week in volume. However, it missed out on the Hardback Non-Fiction number one to Guinness World Records 2020 by just 2,461 units. But its post-Waterstones win far acceded that of 2018’s Book of the Year, Sally Rooney’s Normal People (Faber), which sold 14,608 copies in the first week of December last year. Normal People has gone on to sell over 400,000 units across all print editions in total—The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse, after eight weeks on sale, has already topped 150,000.

Greta Thunberg, named author of the year by Waterstones, also benefitted from a sales boost, with No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (Penguin) rising 66% week on week to 10,952 copies sold. The title remained steady in third in Paperback Non-Fiction, with Carl Chinn’s Peaky Blinders: The Real Story (John Blake) and Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt (Picador) once again holding the top two places.

Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party (HarperCollins) leapfrogged David Baldacci’s Redemption (Pan) as the Mass Market Fiction number one for a second time, selling 10,474 copies. Redemption fell all the way to third place, with a resurgent Tattooist of Auschwitz (Zaffre) beating it to second place by just 10 copies.

Lee Child held the Original Fiction for a fifth week with Blue Moon (Bantam), with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (Chatto & Windus) soaring 60% week on week to climb into the runner-up spot.

Craig Smith and Katz Cowley’s The Dinky Donkey (Scholastic) reigned supreme in the Pre-School number one, though Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers’ The Crayons’ Christmas (HarperCollins) was the highest new entry, hitting sixth place.

The print market bounced upwards 27% in both volume and value week on week, selling a whopping 5.9 million books for £51.9m.