This week sees two surprising new books at the top of Nielsen BookScan’s Independent Bookshop chart – not just because of how much the titles have over-indexed in the indie sector when compared to the full market, but because of their average selling prices (ASP).
Traditionally, books sold in independents via BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM) sell at full price, but both of this week’s top two differ in vastly different ways.
BookScan does not provide volume data for the titles in the indie chart to protect the share of individual retailers, but it does give the ASP which can give us some clues as to how and why books have performed the way they have.
In first place is Helen Rutter’s The Boy with Big Decisions (Scholastic) which comes in with an average selling price of £4.55 – a discount of 43.1% off RRP. It appears in the wider TCM chart at 49th place with total volume sales of 4,411 copies and a slightly higher ASP of £4.76.
Rutter’s book was celebrated with a launch across Hull’s schools library service – which included the One Hull of a Read initiative, gifting children across the whole city a copy of the book – which is possibly what has led to its position in the indie chart this week.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Mark Lawrence’s The Book That Held Her Heart (HarperVoyager) – the third book in the Library trilogy – which comes in with an ASP of £25.20, some 32.7% higher than its £18.99 RRP.
This kind of ASP seen in the wider TCM normally indicates inclusion in a subscription box – though none of the big players, such as FairyLoot or Illumicrate, have claimed Lawrence’s fantasy title this month. A quick search online suggests that The Locked Library – the subscription box website curated by HarperVoyager and Magpie, which only features titles from those imprints – were selling an exclusive edition at £27, though it is no longer available.
Elsewhere in the indie charts, things are a little bit more business as usual with paperbacks of novels on the more literary end, such as Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (Vintage, 10th place), Kate Atkinson’s Death at the Sign of the Rook (Transworld, 11th) and Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road (Faber, 12th) continuing to over-index against their positions in the wider TCM (they are at 86th, 34th and 112th place, respectively).
The full Independent Bookshop Top 20 can be found on The Bookseller’s bestseller pages.
