Following a one-week, Britney Spears–led sales increase, unit sales of print books fell 8% last week compared to the week ended November 5, 2022, at outlets that report to Circana BookScan.
Spears’s The Woman in Me still topped the sales charts, selling more than 132,000 copies, but sales in the adult nonfiction category still fell 3.3%. A year ago, the just-released Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry was number one, selling almost 98,000 copies followed by a number of another solid-selling new releases. In a terrible coincidence, Perry’s autobiography was in second place on this week’s category list following his death on October 28, selling over 35,000 copies. Another autobiography from a well-known television personality, Henry Winkler’s Being Henry: The Fonz…and Beyond, sold nearly 17,000 copies in its first week.
Adult fiction sales dropped 9.8%. Janet Evanovich’s Dirty Thirty sold nearly 46,000 copies in its first week on sale, about 10,000 more than the prior book in her Plum series, Going Rogue, sold in its debut week in 2022. While that was good enough to land the thriller at the top of the category chart this week, it was far from the roughly 127,000 copies It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover sold a year ago.
The only category to see a sales increase last week was young adult fiction, where sales rose 2.8%. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins was in first place, selling nearly 14,000 copies. What the River Knows by Isabel Ibanez was the bestselling new release, selling over 6,000 copies.
The juvenile fiction segment had the worst week, with sales falling 14%. Jeff Kinney’s newest Wimpy Kid book, No Brainer, was number one, selling almost 79,000 copies, but that was about 22,000 fewer copies than his Diper Overlöde sold a year ago.
