The soft fall sales season continued last week, with print unit sales falling 14.9% compared to the week ended November 6, 2021. Sales declined in all categories reported by NPD BookScan, including sales of adult fiction, which has been the best-performing segment this year. Furthermore, the weekly decline was not the result of a huge blockbuster released a year ago, but resulted in weakness throughout all categories.
Sales of adult fiction slipped 0.8% last week despite Colleen Hoover’s It Starts with Us selling almost 125,000 copies in the week. Last year’s top-seller in the category was The Stranger in the Lifeboat by Mitch Albom, which sold over 52,000 copies. The bestselling new release last week was Going Rogue by Janet Evanovich, which sold more than 36,000 copies, putting it in fourth place on the category list.
The juvenile category had the steepest declines, with nonfiction sales falling 20.4% and fiction dropping 19.3%. In fiction, Jeff Kinney’s newest Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, Diper Överlöde, stayed #1, selling just under 101,000 copies. Two new titles followed: The Bad Guys in the Others?! by Aaron Blabey, which sold nearly 35,000 copies, and The Sour Grape by Jory John, which sold over 20,000 copies. Last year, Kinney’s Big Shot, #16 in the Wimpy Kid series, was #1, selling over 125,000 copies.
Sales in juvenile nonfiction fell despite Discover Animals Learning Activity Pad selling nearly 17,000 copies in its first week on sale, which was much higher than the 8,800 copies last year’s #1 seller in the category, How to Draw 101 Animals by Dan Green, sold.
Two new memoirs topped the adult nonfiction category, but sales still fell 16.2% compared to 2021. Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, was #1, selling nearly 96,000 copies and Bono’s Surrender sold almost 45,000 copies.
