She Did It Again

Britney Spears is once again on top of the charts—though this time, it’s not Billboard she’s dominating, but BookScan. The Woman in Me sold nearly 418,000 hardcover copies in its first week, at outlets that report to Circana BookScan, with publisher Gallery Books reporting 1.1 million copies sold in all formats since the book hit shelves on October 24; the publisher is heading back to press for a fourth printing. The “chatty and sometimes searing debut memoir,” per PW’s review, “is affecting, infuriating, and easy to gulp down in a single sitting.” The Woman in Me had the second-best on-sale week this year, behind Prince Harry’s memoir Spare and ahead of Dav Pilkey’s latest Dog Man title.

Rule of Thirds

YA fantasy author Stephanie Garber and contemporary romance author Ana Huang both have hits with the third books in their respective series. A Curse for True Love, the final title in Garber’s bestselling Once upon a Broken Heart trilogy, had the series’ best on-sale week yet, selling roughly 42,500 more copies than the book that gave it its name. King of Greed, the third title in Huang’s Kings of Sin series—all of which were published this year—sold nearly 8,600 more copies in its first week than the first two titles in the series combined.

Pols de Résistance

Outside of the typical hyper-partisan fare, sales of political books have waned during the Biden presidency. But Atlantic journalist McKay Coppins has a modest hit with Romney: A Reckoning. Per PW’s review, the book is a “penetrating analysis of the ongoing Republican civil war through the eyes of one of its last embattled centrists.” That Romney’s Republican presidential run was unsuccessful, that he is retiring from the Senate in 2024, and that he “resists his party’s sharp right turn” makes the book’s top-five slot on our hardcover nonfiction list all the more notable.

NEW & NOTABLE

NO BRAINER
Jeff Kinney
#1 Children’s Frontlist Fiction, #2 overall
The latest title in the perennially bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid series hits our lists as Kinney tours libraries on the West Coast to promote both the book and the value of librarians in an age of book banning.

THE SECRET
Lee Child and Andrew Child
#2 Hardcover Fiction, #5 overall
The 28th entry in the long-running Jack Reacher series is the fourth to be cowritten by its creator, Lee, with the author’s younger brother, Andrew.