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All I want for Christmas is books: the race for the Christmas Number One
It has been 12 weeks since the publication of this year’s edition of the Guinness World Records – the true start of any bookseller’s Christmas – in the last week of August. It was an inauspicious beginning for one of the main contenders for the 2025 Christmas Number One: the latest edition sold 3,105 copies in those first seven days, more than 40,000 units behind that week’s top title, RF Kuang’s Katabasis.
The annual compendium of records has bagged the pole position via NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM) in the last full week before Christmas a near-record five times since records began in 1998 – most recently last year when it beat Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders by 1,900 copies.
So far in 2025, GWR 2026 has sold 67,726 copies – tracking 14.8% down against the same period in 2024, a figure that looks worse when you account for it being published two weeks earlier this year.
On the other hand, Osman’s The Impossible Fortune, the fifth in the Thursday Murder Club series has sold 321,262 copies – which not only makes it the bestselling title of the past three months but puts it ahead of 2024’s We Solve Murders by 11.3%. It seems likely that Osman and the sleuths from Cooper’s Chase will outsell Guinness this year, but will this be enough to claim the Christmas crown?
When it comes to Christmas Number Ones, Guinness is second only to Jamie Oliver, who takes the all-time crown with a total of six – though it has been eight years since his last coronation with the 81,596 copies moved by 2017’s 5 Ingredients.
But Oliver has been going through something of a purple patch in 2025. First, there was his winter release Easy Air Fryer, which scored two number ones in February, while his autumn outing, Eat Yourself Healthy, has shifted 192,004 copies since it was released in September – a robust 118.7% more than 2024’s Simply Jamie sold in the equivalent period.
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Upon publication, Eat Yourself Healthy was Oliver’s fastest-selling book ever, but things have tailed off a little since then – in the week ended 15th November, it sold just 4,056 units via the TCM. In the equivalent period back in 2017, 5 Ingredients was selling six times that amount.
In 2019, David Walliams and illustrator Tony Ross’ The Beast of Buckingham Palace (HarperCollins Children’s) sold 87,900 copies to pip Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse to Christmas Number One by 5,445 units. Fast-forward six years and Walliams’ star has waned, likely ruling him out of contention.
But things look promising for Mackesy. In the most recent data for this analysis (to 15th November), his newest, Always Remember, hit second in the overall Official UK Top 50 and six weeks after its release was beaten only by Dav Pilkey’s newly-published Dog Man: Big Jim Believes. Not only that, Always Remember’s sales are up compared with the previous week and just 740 units behind its pre-decessor’s performance at the same point in its life cycle.
It should not be assumed, though, that the Christmas Number One will be a hardback – there have been three instances since 1998 where a paperback has reached pole position in the trade’s peak sales week, the most recent coming in 2023 with the huge success of GT Karber’s Murdle.
Both volumes of The 1% Club Quiz Book sit at the top two places of the Paperback Non-Fiction chart at the time of writing. In 2024, the first edition experienced a sharp ascension from 3,994 copies in its second week on sale in mid-November up to nearly 10 times that amount by Christmas week. In its second week this year, the second volume has more than doubled its previous year’s performance – and if it continues at this rate, it will achieve more than 87,000 copies in the crucial week, a figure that would have given it Christmas Number One in any one of the past four years.
