Sales Stay Flat for a Second Consecutive Week

At outlets that report to NPD BookScan, unit sales of print books were 0.2% lower in the week ended Aug. 20, 2017, than in the similar week in 2016. It was the second week in a row in which sales were basically flat; in the previous week, sales inched up 0.1%. The impact of the release last year of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child continued to weaken, and unit sales in the juvenile fiction category were just 2% lower than in the week ended Aug. 21, 2016, when sales of Cursed Child were nearly 243,000, down from 484,000 in the prior week. The top-selling juvenile fiction book in the week ended Aug. 20, 2017, was once again Wonder by R.J. Palacio, which sold more than 25,000 copies. The juvenile nonfiction segment had the best performance, with units up 8%. There was little movement among the top category sellers; First 100 Words by Roger Priddy was #1 on the list with more than 6,000 copies sold. Unit sales of print books were 1% higher in the adult fiction category. Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur remained #1 on the category bestseller list, selling more than 19,000 copes. Two editions of Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle—the original trade paperback and the tie-in edition to the movie—combined to sell more than 30,000 copies. Print sales in the adult fiction segment dropped 3% in the week, although two new books debuted in the top two spots on the category bestseller list: The Store by James Patterson and Richard DiLallo was #1, selling more than 23,000 copies, and Seeing Red by Sandra Brown was in second place, selling more than 22,000 copies. The mass merchandiser channel continued to suffer the most with comparisons to last year’s big sales of Cursed Child, with units in the week down 12% from to a year ago.

Unit Sales of Print Books by Channel

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Unit Sales of Print Books by Category

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Unit Sales of Print Books by Format

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