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As Christmas looms, books by Richard Osman, David Walliams and Pinch of Nom look set to be among a four-way fight for the festive top spot, with December poised to hit a record high in sales.
This week, David Walliams and Tony Ross’ Gangsta Granny Strikes Again! (HarperCollins Children's Books) had a third week in the Official UK Top 50 number one spot, after selling 46,488 copies. Guinness World Records 2022 spent a third week in the runner-up spot, bouncing to 42,166 copies sold. Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice (Viking) also returned to the top three, jumping 63% in volume week on week to 40,886 copies sold. The three frontrunners for the Christmas Number One were all within 6,000 copies of one another.
However, next week Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom: Comfort Food (Bluebird) will throw a spanner in the works. For the past two years, the Pinch of Nom duo’s December title has notched up six-figure volume sales in its launch week, before abruptly falling back down the chart to allow either David Walliams (The Beast of Buckingham Palace, 2019) or Richard Osman (The Thursday Murder Club, 2020) to leapfrog into the Christmas Number One. The Pinch of Nom book then tends to spend the entirety of the following January in the top spot. However, both The Beast... in 2019 and The Thursday Murder Club last year were already notching up single-week sales of more than 100,000 copies before Pinch of Nom’s offering cut in.
A diet book in the festive number one spot would be sacrilegious to the spirit of Christmas, yet this year the landscape is flat enough that it might just be able to hang on. Either that, or the ultimate default Christmas Number One, Guinness World Records, could steal it under everyone’s noses.
The market zipped up by nearly a third week on week, rising to 7.5 million books sold for £67.5m. Even among the reliably epic December numbers, this was high—in fact, it was the highest Week 48 in both volume and value since records began.
When sales figures returned to the charts in mid-December 2020, following the lockdown, weekly volume was already at over nine million books sold. Last-minute Covid restrictions scuppered the week running up to Christmas, as bookshops closed, but could 2021 be the year that more than 10 million books will be sold in a single week? The last time volume reached those heights was 13 years ago, in 2008. The record single-week volume was set two years before, in pre-credit crunch 2006, at just over 11 million.
Christmas week has been reliably high in value for the last few years, with 2018’s £90.6m peak the highest since 2007’s record of £95.5m. However, average selling price has increased since the Noughties, with the e-book market taking a chunk out of cheaper fiction paperback sales. Last week’s average selling price of £8.94 was already 26p higher than Christmas week 2007 (£8.68). If volume is going to break records this year, then value is going to join it.