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Christmas comes early at Highclere: Real-life Downton tops the indie charts
Christmas at Highclere by the Countess of Carnarvon, first published in 2019 by Preface Publishing, has risen to the top of the Independent Bookshop Top 20, according to the latest data from NielsenIQ BookScan.
NielsenIQ does not provide sales data for the independent bookshop sector, so it is tricky to say for sure, but it is likely that a majority of the sales come from Highclere’s own gift shop.
The castle (pictured), famously used as the setting for Downton Abbey, offers signed copies via its website and has this week helped contribute to a total of 3,667 units in BookScan’s overall Total Consumer Market. (TCM), enough to put it in 142nd place.
The previous indies number one, Charlie Mackesy’s Always Remember (Ebury Press), is pushed out of the top spot into second place, matching its TCM position. Last week’s runner-up, Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, slips to sixth place with the indies and loses its crown as the most popular paperback as it is replaced by Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare.
Dalton’s memoir of her time caring for an orphaned, wild hare has seen its sales rise 30.6% this week in the full market, but slips a position in the Paperback Non-Fiction chart, though mirroring its placement in the indies chart where it rises one place to third.
The highest new entry into the Indie Top 20 comes from L Frank Baum as the MinaLima Interactive edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Harper) takes fifth place this week. It appears 360 places higher than its TCM position which it achieved with 1,932 copies, up 554.9% from the week before.
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The special edition – widely available to all retailers – has achieved a rare feat, with the average selling price (ASP) in indie bookshops coming in lower than its TCM counterpart, £12.76 versus £13.99. That, coupled with a sudden week-on-week spike, suggests that the majority of sales likely came from one outlet, capitalising on the recent success of Wicked: For Good at cinemas.
It is not the only special edition to perform well with the indies this week. The deluxe edition of Sarah Parker’s When the Moon Hatched (HarperVoyager) has entered the chart in 12th place and, like Baum’s special edition, its ASP in the indies is lower than in the TCM. Alhough, once again, this new edition is not exclusive and is available to all retailers.
Parker appears in 485th place in the TCM, but she is not the biggest over-indexer of the week. Just three places below the first book in the Moonfall series – in both charts – is BobLand by Matt Lucas and illustrated by Begoña Fernández Corbalán (Farshore). The comedian’s latest title, first published at the beginning of November, is the only children’s book to feature in the Indie Top 20 this week.
The full Independent Bookshop Top 20 can be found on The Bookseller’s bestseller pages.
The Bookseller has adjusted the Independent Bookshop chart to remove some titles where sales do not derive from traditional bricks-and-mortar bookshops, such as exhibition catalogues and those featured on conglomerates’ subscription boxes.
