Human Behavior

Beyond the expected current bestsellers and holiday perennials, a glance at this week’s overall top 10 list reveals one wild card: Humans of New York. With more than 48K print copies sold this week, Brandon Stanton’s book, which combines street photography and candid interviews, had its best week ever, including its October 2013 release week and last year’s holiday-season sales. St. Martin’s credits the success to Stanton’s Facebook presence (Humans of New York has more than 11 million “likes”), a targeted national TV campaign, print advertising in People and the New York Times Magazine, and outdoor ads on Manhattan and Brooklyn route buses (17% of books were sold in NYC).

The book has spawned a children’s version, Little Humans, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers released in October 2014. It too bested its release-week sales this week, landing at #11 on our Children’s Picture Books list. In addition to Stanton’s social media presence—a trailer for the book has garnered more than 400K views on YouTube—FSG BYR cites media hits including a CNBC interview and coverage in the Los Angeles Times and USA Today holiday gift guides as fueling the jump in sales.

Ringing in the Season—and the Sales

With holiday sales continuing their strong showing—up 5% over the same period last year, for the second week in a row—several titles are poised to be the breakout hits of the season. Here, we look at adult books that made great gains in the first week of December compared with the preceding week.

In fiction, a 2012 J.R.R. Tolkien boxed set, which includes The Hobbit and the three Lord of the Rings books, is up 208% this week with 7,381 print units sold. The Battle of the Five Armies, the third installment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movie trilogy, opens in theaters on December 17.

Other big fiction titles this week include May 2014’s All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, a 2014 National Book Award finalist, which is up 133% this week and up six spots to #6 on our Hardcover Fiction list. And 2009’s The Walking Dead: Compendium One, written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Charlie Adlard, Tony Moore, and Cliff Rathburn, is up 118%, with 4,963 paperback sold.

Humans of New York isn’t the only nonfiction title to post big gains this week, with cookbooks doing especially well. Mexico: The Cookbook, by Margarita Carrillo Arronte—one of PW’s top 10 cookbooks for fall 2014—is up 451% with 6,154 units sold, accounting for about half of its total sales since its October publication. And food blogger Lisa Leake’s 100 Days of Real Food, which came out in August, moved 6,308 units this week, a 382% boost over last week.

Top 10 Overall

Rank Title Author Imprint Units
1 The Long Haul Jeff Kinney Abrams/Amulet 152,316
2 Elf on the Shelf (boy elf) Carol V. Aebersold CCA&B 96,490
3 Killing Patton O’Reilly/Dugard Holt 81,367
4 Elf on the Shelf (girl elf) Carol V. Aebersold CCA&B 64,979
5 41: A Portrait of My Father George W. Bush Crown 63,943
6 Hope to Die James Patterson Little, Brown 55,792
7 Humans of New York Brandon Stanton St. Martin’s 48,301
8 Make It Ahead Ina Garten Clarkson Potter 47,823
9 Gray Mountain John Grisham Doubleday 47,374
10 Unbroken Laura Hillenbrand Random 47,229