This Week's Bestsellers: March 28, 2016

Games People Play

This week’s highest debut on our Hardcover Nonfiction list, at #5, is World of Warcraft: Chronicle, Vol. 1. A companion to the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, the book, a Dark Horse Comics release, delves into the Warcraft universe’s cosmology, ancient history, and more, and it includes 20 full-color illustrations.

In Hardcover Fiction, Dungeons & Dragons: Curse of Strahd debuts at #6. It revisits the classic Ravenloft adventure, which was created in 1983 for Advanced D&D first edition and was for six to eight players of levels five through seven. Of course, if you understand anything in the previous sentence, you probably knew all this already.

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

Sparking Sales

Debuting at #12 on our Hardcover Nonfiction list is On Fire by motivational and inspirational speaker John O’Leary; it’s the first release from Simon & Schuster’s North Star Way imprint, which publishes in the fields of wellness, inspiration, business inspiration and leadership, and personal development. In his books, O’Leary writes of how, at age nine, he survived a house fire that left him with burns covering 100% of his body and with a 1% chance of survival.

North Star, which emphasizes profile building for its authors, acquired the book in early 2015 and began its marketing efforts then. Using O’Leary’s speaking business as a platform, the imprint worked with his team to develop and implement social media campaigns to raise awareness of the author and his work. North Star also filmed an online course with O’Leary, called Your Life On Fire, which will be released in the next two months.

Full-Court Press

As the country geared up for March Madness, two books on basketball—one on college ball, one decidedly not—hit our Hardcover Nonfiction list. The Legends Club by John Feinstein, about the rivalry among coaches at UNC, Duke, and N.C. State, pubbed March 1 and makes its list debut this week, at #18.

At #22, Boys Among Men by Jonathan Abrams profiles the prep-to-pro generation—Kevin Garnett, Dwight Howard, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and other star basketball players who, between 1995 and 2005, went straight from high school to the NBA. (The association instituted an age limit in 2005.)

Movie Watch

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs is the #3 book in the country this week, buoyed by the March 15 release of the trailer for Tim Burton’s forthcoming film adaptation. Print unit sales of the 2013 trade paperback are up 220% this week over last. The other two books in the trilogy also got a boost: Hollow City, the second novel, is up 125% over last week. Library of Souls, the final book in the trilogy and the only frontlist title of the three (the hardcover pubbed Sept. 2015), is up 74% and returns to our children’s fiction list at #10. The trailer already has more than five million YouTube views; Miss Peregrine’s Home hits theaters September 30.

Top 10 Overall

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.