The Weekly Scorecard: Tracking Unit Print Sales for Week Ending July 24, 2016

Unit sales of print books dipped 1% in the week ended July 24, 2016, compared to the similar week last year, at outlets that report to Nielsen BookScan. Sales in adult fiction fell 9%, as the category continued to face difficult comparisons to last year: in the week ended July 26, 2015, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman sold about 222,000 copies, while the top seller in adult fiction in the comparable week in 2016, the trade paperback edition The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, sold just under 55,000 copies. Adult nonfiction had the strongest performance among the major categories, with unit sales up 5%. It Gets Worse, by YouTube vlogger Shane Dawson, topped the category list, selling more than 26,000 copies in its first week. Another new book, Hillary’s America by Dinesh D’Souza, landed at #3, selling more than 18,000 copies. Unit sales in the juvenile nonfiction segment rose by less than 1% over 2015. Brain Quest workbooks took six of the top 10 bestseller slots on the list, selling a total of more than 32,000 copies. Unit sales in juvenile fiction fell 2%. The only title among the category’s top sellers that had some sales momentum in the week was J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which sold just under 10,000 copies, putting it in third place on the juvenile fiction bestsellers list.

Unit Sales of Print Books by Channel

Unit Sales of Print Books by Category

Unit Sales of Print Books by Format