The Bookseller – Bestsellers – Popular Psychology Charts: Clear thinking – popular psychology stays on level terms against 2024
With sales just shy of 85,000 copies so far this year, Atomic Habits by James Clear is the most popular of the Popular Psychology titles this year – retaining its crown from the same point in 2024, according to data from Nielsen IQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).
That crown, however, is somewhat less glittery than the previous year, when it sold 109,179 copies, earning £1.2m; 2025’s sales have only been able to reach £920,709, a reduction of 23.4%. Clear’s 84,773 copies are still twice as many as his nearest rival – Julie Smith’s Open When… has sold 42,173 copies since it was published at the beginning of January – and all the more impressive as Atomic Habits was initially released way back in 2018 and is on course to be the bestselling Popular Psychology title of the year, a feat it has achieved annually since 2021. Popular Psychology, it should be noted, is a category that can feed on a deep backlist: Clear’s book is one of nine titles in this year’s Top 20 that were originally published before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite Clear dropping a comparative £281,657, the rest of the category has performed somewhat better, delivering £9.4m across the first half of 2025, just 0.4% less than in 2024, the equivalent of £35,935 – an amount that James Clear could take in over just one week. Atomic Habits is one of just nine titles to sell more than 10,000 copies so far this year, (on a par with 2024), but this year’s nine combined to increase their volume sales by 9.9%, helping them deliver £3.2m, a value boost of 17.9%.
Of those top nine, five of them appear in the top list for both years, including Philippa Perry’s The Book You Want Everyone You Love* to Read, which appeared in its hardback form in 2024 and brought in £141,152. The paperback, released early in 2025, has improved by 85.2% to earn £262,004 – it helps take Perry’s total to just slightly more than £267,114, making her one of the big winners of 2025.
Atomic Habits is one of just nine titles to sell more than 10,000 copies so far this year
The others of those five have experienced slightly different fortunes. Dale Carnegie’s classic evergreen How to Win Friends and Influence People has dropped two positions, but managed to take his sales slightly further ahead of 2024, up 0.6%. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow has fallen 32.4%, while Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Idiots has shed just over a quarter of his sales, the equivalent of £133,966.
Those latter numbers, along with Atomic Habits’ slight drop, make the 17.9% increase from the top nine even more impressive. The jump is thanks to three of 2025’s other big winners (alongside Perry), starting with TJ Power who makes his debut into the TCM charts with The DOSE Effect bringing in £225,843 across 17,699 units. Dr Rangan Chatterjee has increased his year-on-year performance by £500,000 thanks to the efforts of Make Change That Lasts. In the first 25 weeks of 2024, Chatterjee’s Happy Mind, Happy Life – first published in 2022 – brought in £21,261, a number that actually dropped more than a third to £13,614 in the same period this year.
It is a similar story for the biggest winner of 2025: Julie Smith has taken second place in the chart with Open When…, a companion to help readers traverse life’s twists and turns, which presumably also covers the twist of sales increasing 8,680% compared with the previous year, or the equivalent of £535,533.
Where there are winners, there must be losers, and aside from Clear and Erikson, the greatest drop has come from Vex King. In the first months of 2024, King’s Things No One Taught Us About Love was the third-biggest book of the category, selling 26,621 copies and racking up £187,506. Yet in 2024, that title has sold a still respectable 7,321 copies, giving it 16th place in the chart in 2025 and a value of £69,232, or a drop of 63.1%.
Roxie Nafousi
Manifest
Michael Joseph, £18.99, 9780241539590
Just 111 copies short of hitting the five-figure mark is Nafousi’s 2022 seven-step guide to making manifesting work for you. It is unlikely that Nafousi manifested an 11.3% drop in units compared with the same period in 2024, but that is its result at the moment. Manifest is on track to sell 18,000 units in 2025, which may see it fall out of the category’s Top 10 for the first time since it was first published.
TCM copies sold: 9,889
