Holiday Hits

Santa was good to booksellers this year. The week before Christmas, overall print unit sales were 7% higher than in the comparable week last year, and a lot of books saw substantial sales jumps. Here are the adult hardcover titles that saw the largest week-over-week increases in unit sales.

Star Wars The Last Jedi The Visual Dictionary Pablo Hidalgo 86%
We Were Eight Years in Power Ta-Nehisi Coates 73%
Killing England Bill O'Reilly 55%
The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance Tom Brady 61%
Manhattan Beach Jennifer Egan 53%

(See all of this week's bestselling books.)

Hometown Heroes

Four nonfiction titles took regional nonfiction bestselling honors last week, with poetry powerhouse Rupi Kaur claiming three regions and cookbook juggernaut Ree Drummond taking two. The outliers were lifted by strong local support: New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s diet and lifestyle book was king in the Northeast, and Mormon church leader (and former airline pilot) Dieter Uchtdorf’s book of inspirational stories cruised to the top spot in the Mountain region.

It’s a Dog (Man’s) World

Captain Underpants creator Dav Pilkey’s latest gigglefest, the fourth in his Dog Man series, debuts a new character: Cat Kid, who joins Dog Man on a quest to to find a missing movie star. It lands at #8 on our Children’s Fiction list, with 17k units sold in its first week.

Top 10 Overall

Rank Title Author Imprint Units
1 The Getaway (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #12) Jeff Kinney Amulet 124,748
2 The Rooster Bar John Grisham Doubleday 89,776
3 Origin Dan Brown Doubleday 87,416
4 The Sun and Her Flowers Rupi Kaur Andrews McMeel 75,903
5 Wonder (movie tie-in) R.J. Palacio Knopf 75,194
6 The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Come and Get It! Ree Drummond Morrow 70,067
7 Grant Ron Chernow Penguin Press 58,843
8 Leonardo da Vinci Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster 57,838
9 Milk and Honey Rupi Kaur Andrews McMeel 56,045
10 Turtles All the Way Down John Green Dutton 52,123

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.