For up-to-date info on 2012's bestsellers, see our updated look.

The bestselling print books and e-books halfway through 2012 look nearly uniform on top (Fifty Shades and Hunger Games reign across all lists). After that, differences begin to creep in. Perhaps most surprising is Amazon’s Kindle top 20, which is entirely fiction, and even includes a few novels that made headlines in past years—The Help and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest are still selling enough e-books to crack the list. The biggest success story on Kindle, however, is Jennifer Probst’s The Marriage Bargain, a novel priced at $2.99 that was the #8 bestselling Kindle e-book of the first half of the year. The book was published in February by Entangled, a new publisher that gives its authors higher royalties (40% on cover price for digital titles). When asked to comment on The Marriage Bargain's runaway success, Entangled publisher Liz Pelletier said, "We were confident this title would sell strong for the genre, but not this well. Sales have far exceeded our expectations, and we couldn't be more thrilled." Mass market and trade paperback editions will release on September 4, with sequels following in October and November.

Another surprise is the number of books that only appear on the top 20 Nielsen BookScan bestsellers. Seven titles, including Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever and Killing Lincoln—#11 and #12 on BookScan’s chart—are considerably lower on Amazon’s charts, with Cabin Fever placing #89 on Amazon’s print chart (there’s no Kindle edition) and Killing Lincoln placing #35 for print and #57 for Kindle. Also missing from the Amazon top 20 are the two biggest religion books of 2012, Jesus Calling and Heaven Is for Real. While the latter is still high on Amazon’s two lists (#39 in print, #23 for Kindle), Jesus Calling—which is BookScan’s overall bestselling adult nonfiction title—is nowhere to be found on either of Amazon’s top 100 bestselling charts. This means that the 361,000 print copies the book has sold in 2012 in the outlets measured by BookScan have mostly come from non-Amazon outlets.

Missing from BookScan’s chart, on the other hand, are two reference books that place highly on Amazon’s chart: The Official SAT Study Guide from the College Board and Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. The two books are mainstays on Amazon, approaching 1,000 consecutive days each on the top 100 bestseller list. The case with these two books is the inverse of Jesus Calling: a huge portion of the 2012 sales for each have come from Amazon.

For BookScan’s bestsellers, the top six titles have all exceeded 1.9 million copies sold in the first half of 2012. Beginning with the #7 title, The Hunger Games hardcover, sales drop precipitously, with no other print book exceeding 600,000 copies sold in 2012.

Bestsellers, January – June 2012

Nielsen BookScan Top 20 (week ending July 8, 2012)

1. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James (Vintage)

2. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)1

3. Fifty Shades Darker by E.L. James (Vintage)

4. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

5. Fifty Shades Freed by E.L. James (Vintage)

6. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

7. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)2

8. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)3

9. The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

10. Jesus Calling: Enjoying Peace by Sarah Young (Integrity)

11. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever by Jeff Kinney (Amulet)

12. Killing Lincoln by Bill O’Reilly (Henry Holt)

13. The Serpent’s Shadow by Rick Riordan (Hyperion)

14. Heaven Is for Real by Todd Burpo (Thomas Nelson)

15. The Lorax by Dr. Seuss (Random House Children’s Books)

16. StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath (Gallup Press)

17. The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central)

18. American Sniper by Chris Kyle (William Morrow)

19. Calico Joe by John Grisham (Doubleday)

20. Oh, the Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss (Random House Children’s Books)

Amazon Kindle Top 20 (as of July 11, 2012)

1. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James (Vintage)

2. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

3. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

4. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

5. Fifty Shades Darker by E.L. James (Vintage)

6. Fifty Shades Freed by E.L. James (Vintage)

7. The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

8. The Marriage Bargain by Jennifer Probst (Entangled)

9. The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central)

10. Fifty Shades Trilogy by E.L. James (Vintage)

11. Defending Jacob by William Landay (Delacorte)

12. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Crown)

13. The Innocent by David Baldacci (Grand Central)

14. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

15. The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Berkley)

16. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (Bantam)

17. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson (Vintage)

18. Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire (Jamie McGuire)

19. The Witness by Nora Roberts (Putnam)

20. 11th Hour by James Patterson (Little, Brown)

Amazon Print Top 20 (as of July 11, 2012)

1. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James (Vintage)

2. Fifty Shades Darker by E.L. James (Vintage)

3. Fifty Shades Freed by E.L. James (Vintage)

4. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)1

5. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

6. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

7. StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath (Gallup Press)

8. The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

9. Fifty Shades Trilogy by E.L. James (Vintage)

10. A Song of Ice and Fire, Books 1–4 by George R.R. Martin (Bantam)

11. The Official SAT Study Guide, 2nd Edition by the College Board (The College Board)

12. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster)

13. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

14. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House)

15. Oh, the Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss (Random House Children’s Books)

16. The 5 Love Languages by Gary D. Chapman (Northfield Publishing)

17. The Blood Sugar Solution by Mark Hyman (Little, Brown)

18. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (Amer. Psychological Assn.)

19. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg (Random House)

20. The Serpent’s Shadow by Rick Riordan (Hyperion)

1 Paperback 2 Hardcover 3 Movie tie-in edition