A Soft Start to 2018

At outlets that report to NPD BookScan, unit sales of print books were 2% lower in the week ended Jan. 7, 2018, than in the first week in 2017. Sales through the retail and club channel slipped 2% from the week ended Jan. 8, 2017, offsetting a 2% rise in sales in the mass merchandiser channel. Both juvenile categories posted gains in the week, and the two adult segments had declines. The juvenile fiction segment had the largest increase from the comparable 2017 week: 4%. The top three sellers in the category remained the same as in the prior week: Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man and Cat Kid was #1 with almost 24,000 copies sold, The Getaway by Jeff Kinney was in second place with almost 15,500 copies sold, and R.J. Palacio’s Wonder was third, selling slightly more than 15,000 copies. Print unit sales rose 3% in the juvenile nonfiction segment. Scout Elf Delivers Letters to Santa Clausby C. Bell was by far and away the most popular book in the category, selling more than 21,000 copies. The Last Jedi Visual Dictionary by Pablo Hidalgo was in second place on the category bestsellers list, with more than 5,000 copies sold. Unit sales were down 2% compared to the similar week in 2017 in the adult nonfiction segment, despite having the week’s top-selling title: Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, which sold almost 29,000 copies in its first week. Another new title, Gabrielle Bernstein’s Judgment Detox, was in third place on the category list with more than 23,000 copies cold. In the first week of 2017, Oprah Winfrey’s Food, Health, and Happiness topped the adult nonfiction charts with more than 41,000 copies sold. Unit sales in the adult fiction category were 7% lower than in the week ended Jan. 8, 2017. The mass market paperback edition of Lee Child’s No Middle Names was #1 on the category bestseller lists, selling more than 19,000 copies in its first week on sale, and another debut, A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window, was in second place with almost 16,000 copies. Looking at formats, three trends that held throughout 2017 continued into the new year: sales of board books had solid sales gains, while sales of physical audiobooks had significant declines and units of mass market paperbacks fell by single digits.

Unit Sales of Print Books by Channel

Unit Sales of Print Books by Category

Unit Sales of Print Books by Format