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Jojo Moyes has toppled clean eating behemoth Joe Wicks, as After You (Penguin), the sequel to bestseller Me Before You (Michael Joseph), sold 53,867 copies for £214,008 to hit the Official UK Top 50 number one spot, according to Nielsen BookScan’s TCM.
This is Moyes’ third overall number one. Despite selling nearly 700,000 copies since its 2012 release, Me Before You has never hit either the overall or Mass Market Fiction number one, but Moyes’ follow-up title The One Plus One (Michael Joseph) held the top spot for two weeks in August 2014.
After You was her biggest-selling hardback to date, outselling the hardback edition of The One Plus One by three to one, and its first week’s sales in paperback are by far Moyes’ biggest ever— 128% up on her previous highest seven-day volume. Only Paula Hawkins has sold more in a single week with an adult fiction title this year so far. Not only has After You unseated Wicks’ Lean in 15: The Shape Plan (Bluebird) but it also brings The Girl on the Train (Black Swan)'s eight-week run as Mass Market Fiction number one to an end.
Me Before You re-entered the Top 50 in the first week of February, off the back of the release of the film adaptation’s trailer, and has consistently charted highly since in the run-up to its cinematic release. The publication of the movie tie-in edition has done nothing to dent its sales; in fact, most weeks both editions have charted side by side. Last week they charted sixth and seventh respectively, for a combined 29,700 copies. In 2016 alone, both editions have shifted just under a quarter of a million copies altogether.
The Shape Plan’s reign may be over (for now; Wicks has a habit of returning to the top spot) but it continued to hold the Paperback Non-Fiction title for a third consecutive week, and the Body Coach’s 24th overall. Combined, sales of The Shape Plan and predecessor Lean in 15 (Bluebird) are now just shy of one million copies.
Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s The Long Cosmos (Doubleday) thundered into the Original Fiction number one spot, displacing Stephen King’s End of Watch (Hodder & Stoughton) and outselling Jessie Burton’s The Muse (Picador) by a scant 35 copies. However, The Muse’s first-week volume of 4,438 copies was a comfortable 1,500 up on Burton’s debut The Miniaturist’s launch in hardback—which went on to sell 102,509 units.
Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups title How it Works: The Dad (Michael Joseph) also lost the Hardback Non-Fiction number one, to YouTuber Tanya Burr’s Tanya Bakes (Penguin), beating the first-week volume of her original (non-cookery) title Love, Tanya (Penguin) by 891 copies.