Perfect storm: Rebecca Yarros bolts straight to the top of the charts
The Official UK Top 50 has seen its sales jump more than 50% in the past seven days, according to the latest data from NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM), a charge that has been led by Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm (Piatkus).
The romantasy star’s third outing in her Empyrean series shifted almost 34,000 units to claim her fifth UK number one. It is the first of seven books this week to sell more than 10,000 copies, a change of fortunes from the previous seven days when only Freida McFadden’s Want to Know a Secret? (Poisoned Pen Press) could break five figures.
The hardback edition of Onyx Storm has sold 324,574 copies since it was first published in January 2025, 40.7% more than its predecessor Iron Flame managed in the same format. Despite that huge demand, the paperback edition has not suffered: its 33,579 copies represent a 76.8% growth against the second Empyrean title’s first week back in November 2024.
Yarros will not be the only author celebrating this week as the paperback edition of Florence Knapp’s debut The Names (Phoenix) – shortlisted for the Debut Fiction of the Year at this year’s Nibbies – moved 24,169 copies in its first few days on sale, enough to put it in second place in both the Official UK Top 50 and the Mass-Market Fiction (MMF) Top 20. Knapp beats Lee and Andrew Child’s Exit Strategy (Transworld), which settles into third on 20,787 copies – a slight 0.9% more than the previous Jack Reacher thriller, In Too Deep, managed in the same week last year, though this time out it appears two places lower in the MMF Top 20. While the first three positions in this week’s Top 50 are filled with fiction paperbacks, the next three slots feature the biggest three kids’ books of the week. Both Rod Campbell’s Fluffy Chick (Macmillan Children’s) and Martha Mumford and illustrator Laura Hughes’ We’re Going on an Egg Hunt (Bloomsbury) dropped in the overall TCM compared with the previous week, both titles had big jumps in sales – up 59.1% and 43.9%, respectively.
The Easter-themed titles swap positions at the top of the Children’s Top 20 which gives Campbell – one of the bestselling picture book authors since records began – his first-ever kids’ number one.
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Fluffy Chick and We’re Going on an Egg Hunt keep ahead of the top kids’ launch of the week, Jamie Smart’s Megalomaniacs: The Invasion Begins (DFB Phoenix), the first in a new series. Smart’s unit performance of 12,338 copies sees him just 333 copies away from topping the Top 20.
Seventh in the TCM this week, and the last title to sell more than 10,000 copies, is Tom Bower’s Betrayal (Blink Publishing). The bestselling Non-Fiction of the week takes a look at the turbulent few years experienced by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and while it has performed better than Bower’s previous hardback – The House of Beckham (HarperCollins) sold 3,088 copies in its first week in 2024 – it is some way off beating Prince Harry’s own take on the situation: Spare sold 467,183 copies in its first few days.
Wannabe Reform MP Matt Goodwin – who lost out in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February – has come second again, this time in the Paperback Non-Fiction Top 20 with Suicide of a Nation (North Star) interesting 5,326 people, a little more than half the number of people who voted for him last month. Why Does Everybody Hate Me? by Alex Partridge (Sheldon Press) has beaten Goodwin to first place with 6,283 copies sold.
Finally, Clare Mackintosh’s It’s Not What You Think – her first outing since her move to HarperCollins – has gone straight to the top of the Original Fiction Top 20. With 6,467 units sold, it beats the lifetime sales of Mackintosh’s previous hardback, 2025’s Other People’s Houses (Sphere) and gives Mackintosh her first number one since Let Me Lie topped the OF Top 20 in 2018 with 4,531 copies sold.
This week’s new releases help boost volume sales by 8.7% to 3.2 million books sold, with value jumping up 7.5% compared to the previous seven days, delivering £30.3m. The Top 50’s jump this week is not enough to help the market keep up with last year – volume sales are down 7.2%, with value slipping backwards by 6.3%
