With no new big book hitting shelves last week, unit sales of print books fell 5.5% compared to the week ended September 19 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan.
The top-selling book last week was once again Bob Woodward’s Rage, but unit sales fell 79% from the previous week, dropping to roughly 72,000 copies. The bestselling new release was Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh, which sold just over 37,000 copies, making it the third most popular title last week.
Both the adult nonfiction and fiction categories had unit sales decline of about 8% last week. The only major publishing category that did not have a sales decline was juvenile nonfiction, which managed to have a 0.5% gain. Big gains in a few smaller juvenile nonfiction subgenres, such as social situations/family/health (up 41.7%) and biographies/autobiographies (ahead 24%), offset smaller declines in the bigger subgenre areas of education/reference/language, games/activities/hobbies, and history/sports/people/places.
As sometimes been the case this year, a decline in week-to-week sales is not reflected in comparisons to a year ago, and that is true in the most recent week. Print unit sales were up 10.3% over the week ended September 28, 2019. For the year-to-date, unit sales increased 6.4% over 2019.
