Thrillers Up, Mysteries Down
A look at which categories saw the biggest sales shifts in the week ended October 26, compared to the previous week, according to Nielsen BookScan.
The Week’s Biggest Minecraft Titles
Have a kid or a niece or nephew? Then chances are you’ve seen them entranced in a game of Minecraft, the phenomenally popular video game that launched in 2009 and was sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion in September. But the game’s developers aren’t the only ones cashing in: strategy guides have been selling in huge numbers (Scholastic has four titles and a boxed set, which have more than 10 million copies in print), and there’s an ever-increasing number of Minecraft-themed fiction books, notably from Sky Pony, whose inaugural title in the Gameknight999 series has spent three weeks on our Children’s Fiction list.
Invasion of the Overworld (Gameknight 999 #1) | 4,266 |
Minecraft: Combat Handbook | 15,163 |
Minecraft: Contruction Handbook | 22,272 |
Minecraft: Complete Handbook Collection | 10,359 |
It’s Grisham Country
Gray Mountain, the new novel from the dean of legal thriller writers, is the bestselling book in the land and swept every region from coast to coast. The book cleared 122,506 hardcover copies in its first week on sale, more than any other adult hardcover so far this year.
Nonfiction Movers & Shakers
Here are the nonfiction titles with the biggest increase in unit sales over last week.
Invincible by Brian F. Martin | 155% |
The Cook’s Illustrated Meat Book by Cook’s Illustrated | 68% |
You and Me Forever by Francis Chan | 59% |
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston | 50% |
Top 10 Overall
Rank | Title | Author | Imprint | Units |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Gray Mountain | John Grisham | Doubleday | 122,506 |
2 | Killing Patton | O’Reilly/Dugard | Holt | 60,995 |
3 | Gone Girl | Gillian Flynn | Broadway | 33,838 |
4 | The Blood of Olympus | Rick Riordan | Disney-Hyperion | 30,190 |
5 | Gone Girl (movie tie-in) | Gillian Flynn | Broadway | 29,016 |
6 | Gone Girl (mass market movie tie-in) | Gillian Flynn | Broadway | 26,570 |
7 | Leaving Time | Jodi Picoult | Ballantine | 22,716 |
8 | Minecraft: Construction Handbook | Scholastic | Scholastic | 22,272 |
9 | Starry Night | Debbie Macomber | Ballantine | 20,929 |
10 | The Best of Me (movie tie-in) | Nicholas Sparks | Grand Central | 18,300 |