Amazon released their annual package of bestseller lists, and as the etailer continues to gain market share on their competitors, those list take on ever greater significance. As usual, the list that they promote only features new books published in 2016, and it combines print and ebook sales. To see the actual overall bestsellers this year, you need to look at their separate print and ebook charts. Amazon’s top 20 new books are: 1. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts 1 & 2, Special Rehearsal Edition Script by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany 2. When Breath Becomes […]
Bestseller Radar
Bestseller Share: Big Five Dominate NYT Lists In First Quarter
You may recall that we recently introduced tools to track “bestseller share” by house, looking at the “slots” on the NYT printed bestseller lists. In our January post, we established five-year benchmarks by publisher as well, to have some basis for comparison going forward. With the first quarter of 2016 completed, we are ready to start following the bestseller landscape through the year. By the first results, the five largest houses extended their dominance of the NYT’s charts to new levels in the beginning of the year. All other houses combined claimed under 6 percent of the NYT slots, with […]
WTF: Swear Word Coloring Books Charge the Bestseller Lists
When Amazon’s CreateSpace helped power the self-published The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep to the top of the charts it was a sweet story, but self-published print success has taken on a different face this month, with a wave of “swear word” coloring books. One Swear Word Adult Coloring Book sold enough units to enter Nielsen Bookscan’s overall bestseller list at No. 54 for the sales week ending January 24. That same title was No. 1 on Amazon’s weekly bestseller list (the real one, that counts actual sales over the course of a full week) for the same sales week […]
Another Lens on 2015: Bestseller Share
As noted a couple of months ago, we have been experimenting with putting filters on top on our big database of national bestseller lists (now over 12 years deep) to extract some comparison info over time. With the year complete, we thought it would be interesting to generate a calculation of NYT “bestseller share” by major publishers. To simplifyy things, the figures below are based on the printed lists only, and calculate total “slots.” (A single title can capture multiple slots on NYT lists in a given week; we track by both titles and slots, but it’s easiest to keep the lens […]
The Print Bestsellers of 2015
As usual, here is our round-up of the top-selling print books of 2015, sold in outlets tracked by Nielsen Bookscan. They year recorded the same number of books selling 1 million units or more — six — as did 2014, but the distribution shifted, with four of those top sellers in adult fiction (whereas a year ago, five of the top six were juvenile/YA titles). Notably, Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning novel sold more than four times as many print copies in 2015 as it did in 2014, when the book was first published. And with Veronica Roth and John Green giving up their […]
Amazon Bestselling New Books for 2015, and Apple’s Best
Amazon has released their annual package of the year’s bestselling, newly-published books for 2015, across multiple categories. Note in particular that, as usual, the publicized lists cover books published during 2015 only. So if you are interested in the titles that sold the best at Amazon during the year, you want to refer to their product bestseller lists that show the most popular print books and ebooks. In the lists released today, these are their top 20 new books for 2015, with combined print and ebook sales: 1. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins 2. Grey: Fifty Shades […]