This Week's Bestsellers: August 3, 2015

Help Yourself

Summertime, and the reading is easy: in the past few months, books by YouTube personalities have become ubiquitous on our bestseller pages. This week, the #1 title in Hardcover Nonfiction—and the #7 book in the country—is Selp-Helf by Miranda Sings, a comically untalented wannabe pop star. Sings is the alter ego of actress and comedian Colleen Ballinger Evans, who, with more than 28.5K print units sold in her debut week—and more than 4.6 million subscribers to her video channel—is achieving the kind of fame that her lipstick-smeared online persona can only dream of.

(See all of this week's bestselling books.)

The Graduate

The Last Ever After, the final book in Soman Chainani’s School for Good and Evil middle-grade trilogy, debuts at #8 in Children’s Frontlist Fiction, with 6,109 print units sold this week. That’s a big jump over first-week sales for the previous books: 2013’s The School for Good and Evil sold 2,398 in hardcover its debut week, and 2014’s A World Without Princes sold 2,656 in hardcover the week it was published. Combined, the first two books in the series have sold more than 216K in hardcover and paperback. Universal Pictures bought the book project outright (rather than simply optioning the rights) the week that The School for Good and Evil was published; Chainani is coauthoring the script with Malia Scotch Marmo, who cowrote the screenplay for 1991’s Hook and was Chainani’s film school professor.

The Sporting Life

A pair of athletically oriented titles make their debuts this week on our Hardcover Nonfiction list. In Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan, a New Yorker staff writer, chronicles his lifelong obsession with chasing waves, from his childhood in California and Hawaii to his adult travels through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, and Africa. It’s at #11 with 5,050 print units sold. Five notches below, Yes! My Improbable Journey to the Main Event of WrestleMania, by popular professional grappler Daniel Bryan, written with Craig Tello, sold 4,213 print units. Bryan is a three-time WWE World Heavyweight Champion who wrestled extensively in Japan; his wife is WWE Diva Brie Bella.

Top 10 Overall