Holiday Sales

Easter landed on April 16 this year, putting three backlist children’s titles—2010’s Happy Easter, Mouse!, 2013’s God Gave Us Easter, and 2012’s The Berenstain Bears and the Easter Story—among the 10 top-selling books in the country. New releases relevant to Easter and to Passover, which began six nights earlier, fared well, too.

#2 Hardcover Nonfiction The True Jesus
#25 Hardcover Nonfiction King Solomon’s Table
#20 Trade Paperback The Case for Christ

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

Pulitzer Bump

The April 10 announcement of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winners sped things up for Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Print unit sales of the bestseller-list fixture, which had been in decline every week since mid-February, shot up 148% post-Pulitzer, lifting the book 11 notches to #12 in Hardcover Fiction.

The paperback edition of Evicted by Matthew Desmond had its best week since its February 28 release: it is up 55% post-Pulitzer, with 3,723 print copies sold, landing it just six places shy of our Trade Paperback list.

Myth Making

Though the coloring book trend appears to have peaked for now, a popular creator can still sell books. Kerby Rosanes, whose first two coloring books have sold a combined 378K print copies, debuts at #13 on our Trade Paperback list with Mythomorphia, his strongest first-week showing to date.

Thrawn of a New Era

A long time ago (1991) at a publishing house not so far away (Bantam Spectra), Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire changed the fortunes of a then-dwindling franchise called Star Wars. The book is credited with reviving the brand, partly inspiring George Lucas’s decision to film the Star Wars prequel movies, and jump-starting what became the massive Star Wars publishing program. Heir also introduced the villainous Grand Admiral Thrawn, who quickly became a fan favorite. Now, 24 years after the third book in the Thrawn trilogy published, Zahn tells of the character’s origin in a prequel novel, Thrawn, debuting at #2 in Hardcover Fiction.

New & Notable

Return of the King

Brian Windhorst and Dave McMenamin

#16 Hardcover Nonfiction

This chronicle of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ ultimately successful effort to bring back superstar LeBron James played best on his home court, which accounted for 22% of print-unit sales.

An American Sickness

Elisabeth Rosenthal

#17 Hardcover Nonfiction

Rosenthal, a physican and the editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News, examines the U.S. healthcare system in a book our starred review calls an “astounding takedown.”

Top 10 Overall

Rank Title Author Imprint Units
1 Thirteen Reasons Why Jay Asher Razorbill 42,188
2 Old School O’Reilly/Feirstein Holt 32,598
3 13 Reasons Why (TV tie-in) Jay Asher Razorbill 28,202
4 The Black Book Patterson/Ellis Little, Brown 22,482
5 Happy Easter, Mouse! Numeroff/Bond HC/Balzer + Bray 22,222
6 God Gave Us Easter Bergren/Bryant WaterBrook 20,640
7 Milk and Honey Rupi Kaur Andrews McMeel 19,655
8 All the Light We Cannot See Anthony Doerr Scribner 19,301
9 The Woman in Cabin 10 Ruth Ware Scout 19,285
10 The Berenstain Bears and the Easter Story Berenstain/Berenstain Zonderkidz 18,468

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.