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Kinsella joins five million club

21.09.10 | Charlotte Williams

Transworld author Sophie Kinsella has become the latest novelist to sell more than five million copies in the UK, joining fellow chick-lit authors Marian Keyes and Maeve Binchy, as well as the likes of Dan Brown and Terry Pratchett.

Kinsella joins a group of 15 fiction authors to have hit the five million mark since Nielsen BookScan records began, with Hachette dominating the list. Six of its authors - Maeve Binchy, Martina Cole, Ian Rankin, Jodi Picoult, Stephen King and Alexander McCall Smith - make the cut. Random House follows closely behind with five authors making the grade: Brown, Pratchett, John Grisham, James Patterson and Danielle Steel. HarperCollins’ Bernard Cornwell and J R R Tolkien, along with Penguin's Marian Keyes, complete the list.

Sales of Kinsella’s latest title, Mini Shopaholic, launched last week, pushed her into this group of top sellers. Linda Evans, Kinsella’s long-term editor at Transworld, said: “Sophie Kinsella’s wonderful novels have captured the imagination of a generation, and it is an enormous thrill to have reached five million copies sold. Sophie’s wit, warmth and brilliant storytelling, together with a great deal of hard work from everyone at Transworld, has gone into reaching this milestone. I am immensely proud of what has been achieved.”

• Charlotte Williams
• Charts
• Sophie Kinsella
• Transworld