In the week before the holiday sales season begins in earnest, unit sales of print books for the week ended November 19, 2022 fell 16.7% from the comparable week in 2021 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Sales were down in all categories.

Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry was the #1 book in the week, selling more than 144,000 copies in its first week on sale. Two other new titles also topped the adult nonfiction category list with Faith Still Moves Mountains by Harris Faulkner selling nearly 60,000 copies and Mike Pence’s So Help Me God selling over 37,000 copies. Still, sales in the category dropped 20% from a year ago when The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones was #1 in the category, selling almost 86,000 copies.

Sales of adult fiction fell 4.1% last week as Colleen Hoover had five of the 10 bestselling books in the category. The top-selling title was It Starts with Us, which sold over 80,000 copies. Her five titles sold a total of about 206,000 copies in the week. The best performing new title was Brandon Sanderson’s The Lost Metal, which sold about 23,000 copies.

Children's fiction sales dropped 16.7% compared to 2021. The highest-charting new title was #47 on the category list as Construction Site by Sherri Duskey Rinker sold about 6,300 copies. Jeff Kinney’s newest Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, Diper Överlöde, once again was #1 in the category, selling over 61,000 copies; a year ago his Big Shot was tops in the segment, selling about 85,000 copies.

Prior to Thanksgiving week, unit sales were 6.1% below the comparable week in 2021 but were comparable to 2020 sales.