Another big sales week for adult fiction and double-digit gains in young adult sales resulted in a rare event in 2022: print sales last week were up over the comparable week in 2021. Unit sales increased 4.4% over the week ended July 24, 2021.
The combination of Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, five books by Colleen Hoover, and two new releases drove adult sales up 23.1%. Crawdads remained #1 on the category list, selling just over 123,000 copies. Led by It Ends with Us, Hoover’s five top titles sold about 295,000 copies last week. It Ends with Us and Crawdads have now both topped 1 million copies sold in the year. The new titles that cracked the top 10 in the segment were Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Daniel Silva, which sold more than 40,000 copies, and Shattered by James Patterson and James O. Born, which sold over 25,000 copies.
Young adult fiction sales rose 15.6% in the week. Jenny Han titles continued to push up sales, with five Han books selling about 83,000 copies. Two new releases that made the category top 10 were Never Never by Serena Valentino, which sold about 9,000 copies, and F.C. Yee’s Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Dawn of Yangchen, which sold just over 8,000 copies.
The 15.8% increase in young adult nonfiction sales benefitted from the success of two adult coloring books, including Stranger Things: The Official Coloring Book, which was #1 in the segment, selling about 4,600 copies.
Adult nonfiction sales fell by a relatively mild 3.4% in the week. The small dip came despite some tough comparisons to a year ago when American Marxism by Mark Levin sold more than 127,000 copies and a Trump book, I Alone Can Fix It by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, sold nearly 91,000 copies. Last week, Atomic Habits by James Clear was #1 in the category, selling over 18,000 copies.
Juvenile fiction sales dipped 0.4%. The newest edition in Aaron Blabey’s Bad Guys series, Open Wide and Say Arrgh!, was #1, selling almost 35,000 copies in its first week on sale.
