The Bookseller.com

4th July 2009

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Official: Brisingr slays rivals

23.09.08 Philip Stone

Thanks to sales of 41,028 in just 24 hours, Christopher Paolini's Brisingr (Doubleday) is the new number one. Under strict embargo until a minute past midnight on Saturday morning, the third instalment in Paolini's Inheritance Cycle series became one of the fastest selling books of all time. Helped by some five figure pre-order figures at the major retailers, one copy of Brisingr was sold or dispatched every 2.1 seconds on Saturday, according to BookScan data.

This offcial figure confirms the book as the fastest selling children’s book in the UK this year, beating Stephanie Meyer's latest Breaking Dawn, and the paperback of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Random House Children's Books in the UK had earlier put out a widely-reported press statement estimating Brisingr's first day sales in the UK to be more than 45,000 copies, or more than "80 books sold every minute". It added, that in Australia, more than 30,000 copies were sold in 48 hours.

The book, which continues the story of Eragon and Saphira's battle against the Empire, is also expected to become the biggest book of the year in America with Random House Inc's initial print run of 2.5 million copies its largest ever for a children's title.

Elsewhere, the charts increasingly adopt a Christmas feel with numerous hardback non-fiction titles beginning to infiltrate the bestseller lists. Paul O'Grady's memoir, At My Mother's Knee joins the top 50 in eighth position thanks to a 17,777 part-week sale, with Bantam stablemates Jamie Carragher's Carra and Andy McNab's Seven Troop firmly entrenched at the sharp end of the hardback non-fiction list.

£31.2m was spent through the market in the week ending 20th September, down 0.5% week-on-week and down 5.3% year-on-year when hardback titles from Jamie Oliver, Terry Pratchett and Nigella Lawson all sold more than 20,000 copies through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market.

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