Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was the bestselling print book in 2019 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Owens’s debut was one of the biggest-selling novels in recent years and easily topped one million copies sold in the year, a rare occurrence for the print edition of an adult fiction book. In 2018, The President Is Missing by James Patterson and Bill Clinton was the top-selling novel, selling more than 703,000 copies. Michelle Obama’s Becoming, the bestselling print book in 2018, finished in second place on the 2019 bestseller list, selling 1.1 million copies. The third book that topped the million-mark level last year was Dog Man: For Whom the Ball Rolls by Dav Pilkey.
Pilkey had three books among the top 20 print bestsellers in 2019 and led a great year for Scholastic’s trade group. In addition to Pilkey’s three books, which are published by Scholastic’s graphic novel imprint Graphix, Guts by Raina Telgemeier, also published by Graphix, sold nearly 444,000 print copies last year, landing it in 17th place on the 2019 bestseller list, while The Wonky Donkey by Craig Smith, released by Scholastic Paperbacks, sold 498,326 copies in 2019, putting it at #14.
Besides Pilkey, two other authors had two books make the top 20 bestseller lists last year. Jeff Kinney scored with Wrecking Ball and Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid, while Rachel Hollis’s Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Apologizing were the eighth and ninth bestsellers in 2019, respectively.
Led by a number of juvenile titles, fiction books had 12 books among the top 20 sellers compared to 10 in 2018, when nonfiction sales, spurred by sales of books related to the Trump administration, soared. Three books about the president were among the top 20 bestsellers in 2018, but none made the list in 2019. Five books, however, that were on the top 20 list in 2018 appeared last year as well.
Source: NPD Bookscan. publishers weekly
