Women authors fared very well at the top of the PW overall bestseller list in 2023. Colleen Hoover, who reigned supreme in 2022, also had a stellar 2023, with her It Ends with Us edging out It Starts with Us for the top-selling title in the year by about 48,000 print copies. A third Hoover novel, Verity, sold more than 935,000 copies. The three books sold a combined total of about 3.4 million copies at outlets that report to Circana BookScan.
The two biggest surprise hits in the year were Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, which sold about 1.2 million and one million copies, respectively. A third woman author who had a big 2023 bestseller was Bonnie Garmus, whose 2022 Lessons in Chemistry sold just over one million copies thanks in part to the Apple TV+ series of the same name. Overall, 17 of the top 25 bestselling print books in 2023 were written by women.
Two memoirs sold particularly well last year, with Spare by Prince Harry selling more than 1.2 million copies, good enough for third place on the 2023 list, and The Woman in Me by Britney Spears in 10th place, selling more than 908,000 copies. Barbra Streisand’s My Name Is Barbra, priced at $47, has sold more than 212,000 copies since its release on November 7.
In a year where adult sales did noticeably better than sales of children’s books, only six children’s titles cracked the top 25 bestseller list chart, led by Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea, which was also the only children’s book to sell more than one million copies at BookScan outlets.
