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No sweat! Andrew Lownie’s Prince Andrew biography takes the (Pizza) Express way to the top
Historian and literary agent Andrew Lownie’s biography of the Duke of York has marched straight to the top of the Official UK Top 50, giving Prince Andrew the only crown he may ever wear, according to the latest data from NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).
Entitled (William Collins) by Lownie – who founded his titular agency in 1988 – sold a princely 18,340 copies in its first three days on sale with an average discount of 45.4% off the RRP, shifting nearly twice as many units as the other big, newsy non-fiction launch of the week, Nicola Sturgeon’s autobiography, Frankly (Macmillan). The former Scottish First Minister’s memoir hit second in the Hardback Non-Fiction chart (HBNF) and fifth place overall, though with a much shallower discount more money was spent on Frankly (just over £239,000) than any other title.
More than three quarters of Sturgeon’s sales have come, unsurprisingly, from bookshops in Scotland, where the biography sits comfortably in first place, with 7,509 sales. That figure is nearly 6,000 more copies than second-placed Entitled which could only manage 1,639 copies north of the border – just 8.9% of its total UK-wide sales.
Sturgeon and Lownie’s titles are two of six new releases in the HBNF Top 20 this week, but their total sales outstrip the rest of the Top 20 combined, with the third biggest newcomer in this corner of the market – Sabrina Ghayour’s Persiana Easy (Aster) – selling 2,606 copies to take fifth place. That number is down 24.4% compared with Ghayour’s previous Persiana title – Persiana Everyday, released in August 2022 – but up 40.3% compared with the first week of 2023’s Flavour.
In second place in the TCM – some 5,000 copies behind Entitled – is Immortal Consequences by IV Marie (Electric Monkey) the first book in a new Young Adult series, The Souls of Blackwood Academy. Despite first being published on the 31st July, it has taken until its third week to trouble the Top 50, thanks to a place in FairyLoot’s YA subscription box.
With 13,105 copies sold this week – just over 11,000 more than the previous seven-day period – Marie easily tops the Children’s Top 20 and keeps fellow subscription box title, Brigid Kemmerer’s Warrior Princess Assassin (HarperVoyager), in second place. Kimmerer’s placing in the FairyLoot Romantasy box earns it first week sales of 10,578 units – the third and final book to break the five-figure mark this week – as well as first place in the Original Fiction (OF) chart.
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Despite being relocated from the top of the Top 50 by the two Andrews, You Are Here by David Nicholls (Hodder) continues to be the most popular paperback of the week, topping the Mass-Market Fiction chart (MMF) with 9,870 copies sold – a 14.4% drop compared with the previous week, but enough to take lifetime sales for the paperback edition to more than 100,000 copies in its sixth week.
Susan Lewis’ Don’t Believe a Word (HarperCollins) is the biggest new release of the week to make a dent in the MMF Top 20, taking eighth place with 5,919 copies sold at the first time of asking, which is up 34.5% compared to Lewis’ March release Nothing to See Here which sold 4,401 copies in its first week on sale before jumping to a peak of 7,056 units two weeks later.
Finally, the Paperback Non-Fiction Top 20 remains relatively static compared to the rest of this week’s charts with the top four titles staying the same this week – despite all of them experiencing double-digit percentage drops in sales.
Gillian Anderson’s Want (Bloomsbury) declines the least, with sales contracting 11.1% to 4,619 units, keeping the Hollywood star 1,216 copies clear of second-placed The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga (Allen & Unwin).
Despite new releases helping take the Top 50 to a rise of 1.1% compared with the previous seven days, volume across the TCM has dropped 4.7% to 3.1 million books while, in-line with previous weeks, value has fallen at a slower rate, down 2.9% to £29.2m. Compared with the same week last summer, volume is down 8.1%, with value declining 4.4%.
