Paula Hawkins’s blockbuster debut, The Girl on the Train, led overall e-book sales for the first quarter of the year, from January to March. The book, released January 13, landed one spot above E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, and Chris Kyle’s memoir, American Sniper (adapted into a film of the same name), hit #3. The 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, came in at #4.
The sales figures and ranking come from PubTrack Digital, a publisher-aggregated e-book-sales tool in which publishers supply confirmed e-book unit sales to Nielsen every month. More than 30 publishers supply figures; free e-books and books sold for less than 99¢ are excluded.
The titles in Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy claimed the top three spots on the juvenile e-book list (not shown), with Insurgent, Divergent, and Allegiant hitting #1, #2, and #3, respectively. The eponymous first book in James Dashner’s Maze Runner series hit #4, and the second book, The Scorch Trials, rounded out the top five for young/adult children’s sales.
Top 25 E-Book Bestsellers, First Quarter 2015
| RANK | TITLE | AUTHOR | PUBLISHER | PRICE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Girl on the Train | Paula Hawkins | Penguin | $12.99 |
| 2 | Fifty Shades of Grey | E.L. James | Random House | $9.99 |
| 3 | American Sniper | Chris Kyle | HarperCollins | $21.99 |
| 4 | All the Light We Cannot See | Anthony Doerr | Simon & Schuster | $13.99 |
| 5 | Fifty Shades Darker | E.L. James | Random House | $9.99 |
| 6 | Big Little Lies | Liane Moriarty | Penguin | $12.99 |
| 7 | Gone Girl | Gillian Flynn | Random House | $9.99 |
| 8 | Unbroken | Laura Hillenbrand | Random House | $11.99 |
| 9 | Fifty Shades Freed | E.L. James | Random House | $9.99 |
| 10 | Private Vegas | James Patterson | Hachette | $14.99 |
| 11 | Fifty Shades Trilogy Bundle | E.L. James | Random House | $29.99 |
| 12 | The Nightingale | Kristin Hannah | Macmillan | $8.99 |
| 13 | The Escape | David Baldacci | Hachette | $14.99 |
| 14 | Still Alice | Lisa Genova | Simon & Schuster | $7.99 |
| 15 | Wild | Cheryl Strayed | Random House | $10.99 |
| 16 | Dark Places | Gillian Flynn | Random House | $9.99 |
| 17 | The Boy in the Boat | Daniel James Brown | Penguin | $9.99 |
| 18 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | HarperCollins | $12.99 |
| 19 | The Longest Ride | Nicholas Sparks | Hachette | $12.99 |
| 20 | Grey Mountain | John Grisham | Random House | $9.99 |
| 21 | A Spool of Blue Thread | Anne Tyler | Random House | $12.99 |
| 22 | Obsession in Death | J.D. Robb | Penguin | $13.99 |
| 23 | Insurgent | Veronica Roth | HarperCollins | $13.99 |
| 24 | Divergent | Veronica Roth | HarperCollins | $9.99 |
| 25 | Allegiant | Veronica Roth | HarperCollins | $15.99 |
