Unit sales of print books fell 3.2% last week at outlets that report to Circana BookScan. The performance wasn’t a bad one—it was just unable to match the same period last year, when It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover sold more than 810,000 copies in its first week on sale.
Faced with that comparison, sales of adult fiction dropped 16.9% in the week. John Grisham’s latest, The Exchange: After the Firm, sold more than 109,000 copies in its first week on sale, putting it in first place on the category chart and topping the 92,000 copies sold registered by his The Boys from Biloxi a year ago. Spy x Family, Volume 10 by Tatsuya Endo sold nearly 20,000 copies in its first week, putting it in sixth place on the fiction list.
The steep decline in adult fiction offset another solid performance by adult nonfiction, where sales rose 6.1%. Rachel Maddow’s Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism sold more than 47,000 copies in its first week, taking the number one spot on the category list. Four other new books were among the category’s top 10 bestsellers, including Jada Pinkett Smith’s memoir, Worthy, which sold over 21,000 copies, and Forever Strong by Gabrielle Lyon, which sold more than 19,000 copies.
In a second case of a category facing tough comparison with a year ago, sales in juvenile fiction fell 3.4%. Last year, Margaret Wise Brown’s boxed set of Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny sold almost 88,000 copies in its first week, while last week’s top seller in the category, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Chalice of the Gods, sold more than 21,000 copies.
Young adult fiction was the only other category besides adult nonfiction to see a sales increase, with sales rising 4.7% in the week. Laura Nowlin’s If He Had Been with Me sold almost 9,000 copies in the week, just beating out The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins for the top spot in the category.
