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David Walliams’ Bad Dad (HarperCollins) has accelerated by 21% in volume week-on-week for its second week in the Official UK Top 50 number one spot, selling 112,672 copies through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. This obliterates Walliams’ previous bestselling single week volume, set nine months ago by World Book Day title Blob. Inside the last two years, only Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Judith Kerr’s Mog’s Christmas Calamity have racked up bigger seven-day volumes.
Jeff Kinney’s The Getaway (Puffin), his 12th Wimpy Kid book, entered the chart in second place, shifting 59,841 copies. Last year, Kinney’s Double Down went head-to-head with Walliams’ The Midnight Gang and missed out on the top spot by 6,866 copies—but this year Bad Dad was streets ahead. The Getaway was 5.3% down in volume on Double Down’s first week, and shifted nearly half what Bad Dad did—though admittedly, on only five days’ worth of sales.
Lee Child, however, did the opposite: the 22nd Jack Reacher title The Midnight Line (Bantam) clocked straight in to the Original Fiction number one and third overall, increasing 1.6% in volume on 2016’s Night School and gifting Child a new weekly record. The author’s new November publication date, which started last year with Night School, really seems to be paying off: The Midnight Line was 55% up in volume on the first week of Make Me, released in September 2015. While Child’s stablemate Dan Brown still holds the bestselling week for an Original Fiction title this year with Origin, The Midnight Line’s first week sale puts it straight into the top 10 bestselling hardbacks of 2017.
David Baldacci’s The Fix (Pan) leapfrogged Peter James’ Need You Dead (Pan) to claim the Mass Market Fiction number one—the seventh year in a row the author has swiped the mid-November paperback fiction pole.
Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (Vintage) clawed back the Paperback Non-Fiction number one from Dynamo’s Book of Secrets (Blink), for a 16th non-consecutive week at the top. Sapiens has now sold nearly a quarter of a million copies this year alone—in its publication year of 2015 it sold (a still impressive) 93,006 units. While Harari featured on Chris Evans’ Radio 2 show in March, and Sapiens was namechecked on ITV 2 highbrow literary review show Love Island in June, the title’s continuing consistent sales mean it’s a real word-of-mouth hit.
Aside from The Getaway, the illustrated edition of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (featuring art by Olivia Lomenech Gill) was the highest new entry in the Children’s and YA Fiction top 20, just three places above the Jim Kay-illustrated Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury). More shockingly, over in the Pre-School chart, Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler were toppled from the number one spot by Paul Moran’s Where’s the Unicorn? (Michael O'Mara), which sold a magical 4,788 copies. After the success of Fiona Watt and Rachel Wells’ That’s Not My Unicorn (Usborne), unicorns seem to be a new trend among toddlers.
Volume jumped 8.4% week on week, hitting its highest level for the year to date and surpassing four million books sold for the first time. While value had a shallower weekly bump, it beat the same week in 2016 by 4.3%—and the gap between the growth of volume and value saw yet another improvement for average selling price against last year, by 5.3%. Only three weeks in 2017 have posted a lower a.s.p. year on year, and the last time was 14 weeks ago.