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Jamie Oliver's Jamie's 15-minute Meals (Michael Joseph) has retained pole position atop Nielsen's official book bestseller lists thanks to solid sales in Christmas week.
Sales of the cookbook totalled 51,854 copies in the week ending 29th December - down 63% on its sales the previous week, but more than double the sales of the next bestselling book of the week, Miranda Hart's Is It Just Me? (Hodder). The latter sold 20,348 copies in the UK last week, and holds second position in the chart, with Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid instalment, The Third Wheel (Puffin), climbing three places into third spot with a sale of 20,055.
The film tie-in editions of J R R Tolkien's The Hobbit (HarperCollins) and Lee Child's One Shot/Jack Reacher (Bantam Books) complete the top five with sales of 19,992 copies and 15,474 units respectively.
In total, £32.7m was spent on printed books in the UK last week - down 56.7% (£42.7m) on the previous week but up 45.5% (£10.2m) on the comparative week in 2011. The big uplift in year on year sales is skewed by the fact that the comparative week in 2011 (Sunday 25th December to Saturday 31st December 2011) contained post-Christmas sales only, whereas week-52 data for 2012 (Sunday 23rd December to Saturday 29th December) included two days of inflated pre-Christmas Day sales.
In December as a whole, printed book sales were marginally ahead of 2011 - by 1.2%, or £2.6m, to £226m.
In a week when the majority of titles saw their sales slump on a bumper pre-Christmas week in which printed book sales reached a three-year high, some titles did manage to buck the trend. Numerous fitness, popular psychology and self-help titles registered solid sales as a key period for the genres begins thanks to New Year resolution makers hitting bookshops hunting for texts and manuals that will help them eat healthily/shed pounds/learn a language, etc.
Books such as Richard Templar's The Rules of Life (Pearson Life) and David McRaney's You are Not So Smart (Oneworld) sold more than 1,000 copies at UK booksellers last week, while new titles including Rosemary Conley's The FAB Diet (Arrow), James Duigan's Clean & Lean Warrior Workout (Kyle), Paul McKenna's The Hypnotic Gastric Band (Bantam Press) and a number of titles in Simon & Schuster's new Weight Watchers "Mini" series enjoyed solid early sales ahead of official publication dates in January.
Thirteen books enter the Official UK Top 50 this week, many of them re-entries. Five of the 13 are annuals which, as is traditional due to the fact the majority are "firm sale" and exempt from being returned to the publisher/distributor, are currently being discounted heavily by bookshops post Christmas. According to BookScan, the average discount offered on the top 20 bestselling annuals was 63.2%. In January last year, annuals sold at an average r.r.p. discount of 77.8% as retailers gave away £1.3m in promotional discounts on at r.r.p. sales of £1.7m.