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Lee Child in rare chart feat

26.03.08 Philip Stone

With Bad Luck and Trouble topping mass-market fiction and Nothing to Lose (both Bantam) in pole position in Original Fiction, Lee Child joined an elite list of authors to enjoy a double number one within The Bookseller's fiction charts. The only other authors to to do so over the past five years are Danielle Steel, Terry Pratchett and James Patterson.

Child's feat is even more impressive given Nothing to Lose débuted in first position after only part-week sales of 14,118, while Bad Luck and Trouble held firm, with a 32,607 copies sold over seven days, despite strong performances from two other new entries in mass-market fiction.

Penny Vincenzi's latest, An Absolute Scandal (Headline), entered the charts in third overall, with a 30,048 part-sale through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market. Meanwhile, a major advertising campaign and a new look for Karin Slaughter helped her achieve fourth position overall with 21,996 sold in the seven days ending 22nd March.

Thanks to book-of-the-week spots at Borders for Jacqueline Wilson's My Sister Jodie (Doubleday) and at Waterstone's for Anne Enright's Booker-winning The Gathering (Vintage)--as well a fifth week at number one for Delia Smith--Random House dominates this week's Top 50. The publishing group's 15 titles in the top 50 were responsible for 43% (£1.4m) of the entire revenue generated by the top 50.

Easter Analysis

Although Easter doesn't command the sales figures of other annual events in the publishing calendar, its influence can still be observed, especially within the children's genre.

Fiona Watt's That's Not My Bunny, in Usborne's Touchy-Feely board book range, proved the most popular rabbit-related title last week, selling 1,188 copies. Roger Priddy's Easter Stickers (Priddy) and Brian Wildsmith's The Easter Story (OUP) were two other titles to achieve sales above the 1,000 mark last week.

With Easter, World Book Day and school holidays all out-of-sync in comparison to last year, year-on-year analysis is difficult. The volume of sales through the TCM last week totalled 4.6m, up 15.9% year-on-year, and up 10.6% in comparison to the week leading up to Easter last year (ending 7th April).

Given Easter fell early this year, catching the back end of World Book Day, 141,385 of those sales came from the £1 tie-ins, while another 37,515 sales came from Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking (Ebury).

However, stripping out these figures from last week would still see sales up around 4.4% comparative to Easter week 2007, meaning that even poor weather wasn't enough to keep shoppers away.

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