A week on from the influx of titles into the chart during Super Thursday, the latest charts from NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM) reflect a market that is settling down ahead of the peak trading season in November and December.

The starkest display of that is the drop in sales across the Top 50 – the latest data shows that the most popular titles sold a total of 355,922 copies between them, a drop of 34.2% compared with the previous week.

At the top of the ranking is Charlie Mackesy’s Always Remember (Ebury Press), neatly mirroring that overall decline with a drop of 34.8% from its debut week to 41,782 copies. Adding that to its first week gives a total of 105,907 units – a figure which its predecessor, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, took seven and a half weeks to reach after its autumn 2019 release.

It gives Mackesy a second consecutive week at the top of the Hardback Non-Fiction Top 20 (HBNF), ahead of Ruth Jones and James Corden’s When Gavin Met Stacey and Everything in Between (Bantam), which sticks to second place in the HBNF chart, but drops to 10th place in the Official UK Top 50 as sales contracted 76.4% to 7,881 copies.

Richard Osman remains at the top of the Original Fiction (OF) Top 20 for a fourth consecutive week as sales of The Impossible Fortune (Viking) fall in line with the Top 50’s run-rate, down 34.4% to 21,979 copies.

Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets (Bantam) rises to second place in the OF Top 20 and returns to the UK Top 10, despite its sales falling 23.3% to 9,798 copies, giving the latest Robert Langdon thriller its first sub-10,000-unit weekly performance since it was published a month and a half ago.

Brown’s sales are 58 copies ahead of its nearest rival, The Long Shoe by Bob Mortimer (Gallery), which has shifted 9,740 units in its second week on sale, a fall of 60.1% compared to its debut performance, which means that while it retains third place in the OF Top 20, it drops two spots to eighth in the TCM Top 50. That is potentially a disappointing second week for Mortimer – down 33.2% compared to the second week of The Hotel Avocado, following a first week that was flat year-on-year.

Continues…