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E L James has become only the 12th writer to score sales of 10m or more since official sales records began.
In the week that Hairy Bikers Dave Myers and Si King knocked James off the top of the Official UK Top 50 after 22 consecutive weeks at number one, sales of her Fifty Shades trilogy totalled 94,215 copies at UK booksellers, pushing her since-publication sales total into seven figures.
According to Nielsen BookScan data, just five other writers for adult audiences have seen their print sales pass the 10m mark since records began in 1998: James Patterson, Terry Pratchett, Dan Brown, John Grisham and Danielle Steel. Five children's writers have achieved the feat—J K Rowling, Jacqueline Wilson, Roger Hargreaves, Julia Donaldson and study guide guru Richard Parsons—and one non-fiction writer—Jamie Oliver.
In total, James' novels have sold 10,063,700 copies since they hit bookshop shelves, with a total value to booksellers after discounting of £44,617,000. Since Random House published mass-market editions of her erotic trilogy in April, an average of £1.86m has been spent on physical copies of the books in the UK.
At the height of her popularity in the first week of July, 20p in every pound spent on a book in the UK went towards a copy of one of James' three novels, while BookScan data reveals that in the eight weeks to 11th August period, she was worth almost 40% of the entire fiction market.