‘Go Set a Watchman’: Still no. 1

Sales dropped sharply for Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman in its second week of publication. But it remained the best-selling book in the country for the week ending July 26, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Nielsen reported sales of 220,000 for Watchman, less than a third of Nielsen’s total for the novel’s first week on sale. Nielsen tracks around 85 percent of the print market and does not include e-book sales.

Publisher’s Weekly put things into a different perspective: Watchman may have seen a 70 percent decrease in sales from its first week, but it still sold more than three times the number of copies than the no. 2 book on the chart, E.L. James’s Grey, did. (Grey sold slightly more than 65,000 copies in the week.)

Publisher HarperCollins announced last week that Watchman, panned by many critics, had already sold around 1.1 million copies in North American alone. The total includes e-books, audiobooks and pre-orders for Watchman, which topped best-seller lists soon after HarperCollins revealed in February that a second novel was coming from the author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

This story was originally published July 30, 2015 at 11:26 AM with the headline "‘Go Set a Watchman’: Still no. 1."