This Week's Bestsellers: November 16, 2015

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Four years ago, Rosanna Pansino posted a video of herself baking a Super Mario cake with fondant icing. Almost 200 episodes—and five million subscribers—later, her Nerdy Nummies online cooking show has spawned a cookbook of the same name, which debuts at #15 on our Hardcover Nonfiction list, with 8,963 print units sold.

Schooling the Competition

The #1 book in the country is Old School, the 10th installment in Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series. With 313K print units sold, it outpaces the #2 book, Stephen King’s The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, by a factor of five. Abrams has made a huge global push for Kinney’s book, sending the author on a tour that will take him to 15 countries in 33 days. That effort seems to have paid off: the publisher reports that global sales for Old School, print and e-book, topped one million copies last week.

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

Here Comes Trouble

If you’re not a fan of the defunct sitcom King of Queens, you may be unfamiliar with the name Leah Remini, and you may wonder why her memoir, Troublemaker, debuts at #3 in Hardcover Nonfiction and #8 overall, with 37.8K print units sold. A clue to the book’s success is found in its subtitle, Surviving Hollywood and Scientology. This tell-all dishes on the church’s most high-profile adherent, Tom Cruise; Newsweek recently detailed a number of the book’s claims: Cruise asked Remini to invite Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony to his and Katie Holmes’s wedding, and he once invited a number of Scientologists and celebrity friends over to his home to play hide-and-seek.

At the Movies

The film The 5th Wave, based on Rick Yancey’s 2013 YA novel about an alien invasion, is set for a Jan. 15, 2016, release. This week, the movie tie-in edition debuts at #9 in Children’s Frontlist Fiction, with 6,489 print units sold. Also debuting this week is the second book in the series, The Infinite Sea, at #19, with 3,817 print units sold. In between, at #14, the conventional trade paper edition of The 5th Wave sold 5,145 units; it’s sold almost 140K units since its February 2015 release.

New and Notable

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
Stephen King
#1 Hardcover Fiction, #2 overall
59.7K print units

PW’s starred review says this collection of 20 stories and poems “draws on the deepest emotions: love, grief, fear, and hope.”

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates
Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger
#4 Hardcover Nonfiction,
#9 overall
35K print units

Kilmeade, a Fox & Friends cohost, and Yaeger, his coauthor on 2013’s George Washington’s Secret Six, return with a second story from early U.S. history.

The Japanese Lover
Isabel Allende
#16 Hardcover Fiction
6,583 print units

This “magical and sweeping tale,” per PW’s starred review, tells of a love affair between a young Jewish woman sent from Europe to live in San Francisco on the eve of WWII and the son of the Japanese gardener who works for her family there.

Top 10 Overall

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.