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American crime author Tess Gerritsen has gone straight to number one in her first-ever appearance in The Bookseller Weekly E-Book Ranking, while Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale dropped into second.
I Know a Secret, the 12th book in Gerritsen’s Boston-based Rizzoli and Isles series, topped the E-Book Ranking in its début week, during the same seven-day period which it shifted 3,065 units in hardback through Nielsen BookScan and hit second place on The Bookseller’s Original Fiction chart. This is the ninth e-book number one of the year for Gerritsen’s publisher Transworld, meaning the Penguin Random House division has captured the pole position for 30% of 2017's Weekly E-Book Rankings. Gerritsen also, trivia fans, becomes the first qualified medical doctor to hit the e-book summit.
Atwood’s dystopian feminist novel has ruled the summer in digital books, helped by the adaptation starring Elisabeth Moss, shown in the UK on Channel 4. Since the end of May The Handmaid's Tale has scored seven number ones and has never dipped below fifth place in the ranking.
The book that beat I Know a Secret to the Original Fiction number one was also a débutant, Philippa Gregory’s The Last Tudor. The historical novelist moved 13,324 hardbacks of The Last Tudor through the tills that week—the only hardback adult fiction title to sell more in a seven-day period this year was Paula Hawkins’ Into the Water (Doubleday). The Last Tudor also notched a fourth-place finish in this E-Book Ranking, continuing Gregory's consistently strong first-week e-book performance—Gregory's last two titles have also hit the top 10 in the digital ranking at launch, with Taming of the Queen (Simon & Schuster) hitting at seventh place in October 2016 and Three Sisters, Three Queens (Simon & Schuster) débuting in third in August that same year.
The late Helen Dunmore and Chris Ryan joined Gerritsen in taking their first E-Book Ranking bows. Warlord, Ryan's fifth book featuring "SAS legend" and special ops bad-ass Danny Black (this time he and his team are after some bad hombres in a Mexican drug cartel), hit 18th place in the same week its hardback was released selling 1,439 units through BookScan. Dunmore's 18th Century-set The Birdcage Walk places a spot above Ryan's novel. This coincided with the paperback release and probably benefited from publicity around a bricks and mortar promotion—The Birdcage Walk is Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month for August, and has sold 28,495 print units in mass market since being released on 3rd August.
WKS | TITLE | AUTHOR | IMPRINT | ISBN | DLP | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | I Know a Secret | Tess Gerritsen | Transworld | 9781448169573 | £9.99 |
2 | 14 | The Handmaid's Tale | Margaret Atwood | Vintage | 9781446485477 | £4.99 |
3 | 1 | The Forbidden | Jodi Ellen Malpas | Orion | 9781409166436 | £4.99 |
4 | 1 | The Last Tudor | Philippa Gregory | Simon & Schuster | 9781471133084 | £11.99 |
5 | 2 | The Keeper of Lost Things | Ruth Hogan | Hodder & Stoughton | 9781473635494 | £3.99 |
6 | 28 | The Couple Next Door | Shari Lapena | Transworld | 9781473541542 | £4.99 |
7 | 11 | The Dry | Jane Harper | Little, Brown | 9781408708187 | £4.99 |
8 | 12 | Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine | Gail Honeyman | HarperCollins | 9780008172138 | £7.99 |
9 | 24 | I See You | Clare Mackintosh | Little, Brown | 9780751554137 | £4.99 |
10 | 5 | The Underground Railroad | Colson Whitehead | Little, Brown | 9780708898383 | £3.99 |
11 | 12 | The Whistler | John Grisham | Hodder & Stoughton | 9781444791112 | £4.99 |
12 | 8 | My Not So Perfect Life | Sophie Kinsella | Transworld | 9781473510616 | £4.99 |
13 | 19 | Small Great Things | Jodi Picoult | Hodder & Stoughton | 9781444788020 | £4.99 |
14 | 9 | A Game of Thrones | George R R Martin | HarperVoyager | 9780007378425 | £3.99 |
15 | 3 | Then She Was Gone | Lisa Jewell | Cornerstone | 9781473538337 | £5.49 |
16 | 10 | The Power | Naomi Alderman | Viking Adult | 9780670919970 | £4.99 |
17 | 1 | Birdcage Walk | Helen Dunmore | Cornerstone | 9781473535718 | £4.99 |
18 | 1 | Warlord | Chris Ryan | Hodder & Stoughton | 9781444783391 | £12.99 |
19 | 5 | The Good Daughter | Karin Slaughter | HarperCollins | 9780008150785 | £9.99 |
20 | 10 | Sapiens | Yuval Noah Harari | Vintage | 9781448190690 | £5.49 |
Data is for week ending 12th August 2017
Titles with a selling price below £2 are excluded, as are titles priced £4.50 or below with any print versions priced above £17.99. Participating publishers: PRH UK, Hachette, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Bloomsbury and Simon & Schuster. WKS the number of weeks in chart. DLP digital list price.