An early Easter and the release of the newest edition in Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man series combined to increase unit sales of print books by 2.7% last week over the comparable week in 2022 at outlets that report to Circana BookScan. With Easter Sunday occurring April 9 this year, compared to April 17 in 2022, all categories except adult nonfiction posted increases over 2022.
The largest increase came in children's fiction, where sales rose 11.4% over last year. Pilkey’s Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea sold more than 225,000 copies in its first week on sale. Little Blue Truck’s Springtime by Alice Schertle was in second place on the category chart, selling just over 27,000 copies.
Good sales for a number of Easter-related titles resulted in a 1.8% sales gain in the children's nonfiction category. The Story of Easter (Little Golden Book) by Jean Miller was #1, selling over 9,200 copies.
The young adult fiction category had an 11.1% sales increase. If He Had Been with Me by Laura Nowlin remained at #1 this week, selling more than 16,000 copies. A new release, Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Garber, landed in fourth place on the category list, selling nearly 8,700 copies.
Sales of adult nonfiction fell 5.7% despite a number of strong debuts. Outlive by Peter Attia was in first place on the category chart, selling more than 61,000 copies. Five other new titles were among the top 10 category bestsellers last week, led by You’re Going to Make It by Lysa Terkeurst, which sold nearly 21,000 copies.
Last week’s sales increase was the fourth consecutive week that sales rose over 2022, and the recent sales improvement over a sluggish start left sales in the first period of 2023 only 0.3% below the first quarter of 2022
