You are viewing your 1 free article this month.
Sign in to make the most of your access to expert book trade coverage.
Yael van der Wouden keeps on keeping on at the Indies: The Safekeep returns to first place
While the biggest paperback of the summer may well be David Nicholls’ You Are Here (Hodder) it is having to settle for a runner-up slot in independent bookshops as Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep returns to the top of the Indie Bookshop Top 20 for another week, according to the latest data from NielsenIQ BookScan.
It is a week with a lot of change, as the big new releases from the previous week – MW Craven’s The Final Vow (Constable), Melissa Poett’s The Enemy’s Daughter (Harper Fire) and Indie number one Nicola Sturgeon’s Frankly (Macmillan) – all drop out of the Indie Top 20, replaced with several re-entries and four new Romantasy launches.
Leading those Romantasy titles is a special hardback edition of Samantha Birch’s Cat Dragon (One More Chapter) – which has debuted in second place in the Indie Top 20, 273 places higher than its placing in the Total Consumer Market (TCM). Meanwhile, the standard paperback edition has only sold 167 copies across the TCM to make position 2,687.
Continues…
Read More
The Dragon Wakes with Thunder by KX Song (Hodderscape) debuts in sixth place in the Indie Top 20, while The Baby Dragon Bakery by AT Qureshi (Avon) takes 10th – both of them over-indexing several hundred places compared to their TCM positions. The fourth new Romantasy entry of the week falls slightly behind with indies: Callie Hart’s Quicksilver (Hodderscape) debuts in 11th place, six positions lower than in the TCM.
Elsewhere, paperback editions of There Are Rivers in the Sky from Elif Shafak (Penguin), Raising Hare from Chloe Dalton (Canongate) and Intermezzo from Sally Rooney (Faber) continue to out-perform in indies – along with The Wedding People by Alison Espach (Phoenix), which has been consistently selling both in indie bookshops and the TCM.
Of There Are Rivers in the Sky, Jo Coldwell at Red Lion Books said: "There Are Rivers in the Sky is selling on its own merit. It is an astonishing book. Elif Shafak is also active on social media and has a reputation for being compassionate and intelligent. At Red Lion Books we have sold multiple copies because it was our bookclub choice. Over 100 of us met in person and the book inspired wonderful talks and genuine consideration around having a tattoo inspired by the book."
While Karen Brazier of FOLDE in Dorset had praise for Raising Hare: "As a specialist nature bookshop, we’re delighted to see Raising Hare achieving such success on the indie bestseller list. Nature writing is sometimes considered a niche genre, but Chloe Dalton’s powerful and accessible storytelling has clearly resonated beyond its traditional readership, ensuring the book’s important and very timely messages reach a broader and more diverse audience."
The full Independent Bookshop Top 20 can be found on The Bookseller’s bestseller pages.
