Christmas reads: what is everyone buying so far?

Today is Black Friday, supposedly the important day for retail. As far as our predicted Christmas winners goes, it’s a one horse race already: David Walliams retains his crown as king of kids, with his latest Awful Auntie still miles ahead of the pack; sales have shot up by another 100,000 to 353,362 since our first blog looking at the big book retailers’ sales predictions. Here is the top 10 bestsellers from the predicted list, by volume sold:

The top 10 adjusts a bit when taking costly hardbacks and glossy cookbooks into account:

It’s a measure of the capriciousness of the Christmas market that not one of our eight soothsayers foresaw the success of actress Lynda Bellingham’s memoir, There’s Something I’ve Been Dying to Tell You, which soared to the top of the charts after being published 10 days before her death.

Second on the list of those that were predicted is Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which lags 133,000 behind Awful Auntie but continues to trundle along with­ a healthy 220,000 in paperback sales since June. However, this is only an increase in 15,000 sales since October – positively stagnant compared to its average sales of approximately 44,000 a month. Meanwhile, guaranteed annual Christmas hit The Guinness World Records 2015 sits in third, up from 76,000 to 168,534.

Fiction is performing well, making up half of the top 20. Cookbooks are also going like hot cakes, with the GBBO Big Book of Baking is doing well (76,614 sales), though it remains to be seen whether the Great British Bake Off will be able to sustain its momentum until Christmas­. Judge Mary Berry is also doing well with her oddly titled Mary Berry Cooks the Perfect (55,983), but the GBBO Christmas book (18,218) and Paul Hollywood’s British Baking (14,084) have settled a little lower – perhaps that also settles which GBBO judge the British public like more, too.

Memoirs­ and biographies are selling consistently, but the bestseller by a mile is Roy Keane and Roddy Doyle’s The Second Half , which almost doubled its sales in a month to 100,728, followed by Kevin Pietersen’s autobiography (up to 53,786, from 36,000 in October).

The two standout performers in comparison to last month are both fiction: CJ Sansom’s Lamentation, part of his Shardlake series; and the latest in Jeff Kinney’s bewilderingly samey-looking but much loved children’s series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul has sold over 166,000 copies since being released on 6 November, shooting up to fourth spot on our predicted bestsellers list, while Sansom’s Lamentation has rocketed to 70,477, landing tenth spot despite being a hardback. Reader loyalty is important for sales even at Christmas: Sansom and Kinney’s books are the sixth and ninth books in a series, respectively. Wilbur Smith and Martina Cole, both authors with long and loyal readers, are also doing very well with their latest hardback releases, both selling over 56,000 copies in the last couple of months.

We can also measure the effect of book prizes­ on sales, with both the Man Booker and the Samuel Johnson Prize making an impact this year: Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North has almost doubled sales in a month, from 24,000 to 44,000, while Helen McDonald’s lovely memoir­-cum-falconry-guide, H is for Hawk has almost done the same after her Samuel Johnson win, going from 14,365 to 26,645 copies sold.

Russell Brand’s Revolution has shot up to 48,376 in sales, from 6,947 in our last blog – which was a slightly unfair measure of sales because of our timing, six days after the publication of Revolution. Other books who suffered due to their publishing date and the timing of our last blog include Bernard Cornwell’s The Empty Throne (from 15,000 to 41,998) and Stephen King’s Revival, which went from a paltry one copy, to 23,643 sold in a month.

There are a couple of under-performers: Rachel Joyce’s debut The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was hugely popular, but her second, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy is not really reaching the expectations of booksellers ­– Amazon UK, Mr B’s, Chorleywood Bookshop and Walkers Bookshop all picked Joyce’s newest as a bestseller, but the hardback has sold a healthy, but unremarkable 12,068; perhaps her readership is a paperback one. The Minecraft Blockopedia is sure to appear in stockings up and down the country, but continues to lurk at the bottom of the list before its publication on 4 December – despite that, it has somehow managed to sell 89 copies.

Looking back at the predictions list now, it seems like Amazon UK have the best eye for what the average book-buyer wants this Christmas: 12 of their 20 predictions are in the overall top 20 predicted bestsellers. Walkers Bookshops are also doing well, with seven of their predictions featuring in the top 20, followed by Waterstones, with six.

However, some mention must be made of the independents, who included some more niche predictions based on their individual customer bases. Blackwell’s were the only ones to pick H is For Hawk as a potential bestseller before the Samuel Johnson win, and it looks like Mr B’s venture into publishing is shaping up nicely: Fox Finch & Tepper has sold 172 copies of D’Arcy Niland’s The Shiralee in the last three weeks.