The Bookseller.com

2nd December 2008

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Rowling and Ross dominate 2007 bestsellers

02.01.08

Hachette narrowly beat Random House in the battle for the top 100 bestsellers of 2007, according to Nielsen BookScan's annual list of the year's hits. Random House managed 27, and so narrowly lost to Hachette (including Hodder, Little, Brown and Orion) on 28. However, as author John Dugdale writes in the Guardian, behind the statistics at the top of this year's chart lies a titanic clash, not with publishers, but between J K Rowling and Amanda Ross, rivals for the title of the book world's most powerful figure.

The children's and adult versions of the final Harry Potter take the top two spots in the chart, but from number 3 down, the rest of the top 100 shows no erosion of the ability of Ross, the woman behind Richard & Judy's Book Club, to turn books by previously unknown authors into hits.

"Like the Premier League, publishing consists of a big four, with other teams - notably Bloomsbury, in Harry Potter years - occasionally providing serious competition. Independent publishers did less well than in recent years: neither Faber nor Profile, both regular sources of Christmas crackers, had a chart entry. Penguin published 11 of the list's titles, including Clarkson's trio and two top-5 novels, while HarperCollins scored 14 with a mixture of Ramsay, misery memoirs and R&J-friendly fiction. At the top of the table, Random House (including Transworld) managed 27, and so narrowly lost to Hachette (including Hodder, Little, Brown and Orion) on 28."

Guardian

Bestseller News Amanda Ross J K Rowling