Thanksgiving week turned out to be a good one for book sales, with units up 9.7% last week over the comparable week in 2020 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan.
Three new adult fiction titles led to a 35.3% increase in unit sales in the category over the week ended November 28, 2021. The newest volume in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, Go Tell the Bees I Am Gone, sold nearly 183,000 copies in its first week on sale. In second place on the category list was The Becoming, the second book in the Dragon Heart Legacy series by Nora Roberts, which sold more than 42,000 copies. This was followed by Fear No Evil by James Patterson, which almost 37,000 copies.
Print units jumped 39.1% in the young adult fiction category led by Brandon Sanderson’s newly released Cytonic, which sold almost 21,000 copies. In second place was Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End, which sold over 16,000 copies. The title has sold nearly 602,000 copies in 2021.
Jeff Kinney’s Big Shot continued to head the juvenile fiction bestseller list, selling more than 88,000 copies. It was trailed by J.K. Rowling’s The Christmas Pig, which sold just over 35,000 copies.
Adult nonfiction sales fell 1.2% in the week, a good performance considering this time last year Barack Obama’s A Promised Land sold over 411,000 copies in its second week on sale, giving it a two-week sales total of 1.2 million copies. Last week, The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was #1 in the category, selling over 46,000 copies in its second week on sale, followed by two other titles that were released on November 16: The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which sold over 37,000 copies, while All American Christmas by Rachel Campos-Duffy and Sean Duffy sold almost 35,000 copies.
