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Spending on printed books soared by more than £2m in the UK last week, with the value of the book market up almost 10% on the same week last year.
Nielsen BookScan data reveals £24.4m was spent on physical books in the UK in the seven days to 30th March—up 10.3% on the previous week and an increase of 8.9% on the same week in 2012.
With schools breaking up for the Easter holidays, sales of children's books through BookScan's top 5,000 bestseller list jumped 23% week on week, while sales of adult fiction titles climbed by 20%.
Women's Prize for Fiction nominee Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (Phoenix) was the bestselling book in the seven-day period, scoring sales of 21,971 copies. Sales climbed 30% on the previous week, helped by widespread media speculation on the psychological thriller's potential to become "the new Fifty Shades". In total, Gone Girl has sold just over 200,000 copies in the UK since publication last year. E L James' Fifty Shades of Grey (Arrow) has sold more than 4.2m copies over the same period.
Last week's Official UK Top 50 chart-topper, Philippa Gregory's The Kingmaker's Daughter (Simon & Schuster), falls one place to second position this week, while "Great British Bake Off" star Paul Hollywood's Bread (Bloomsbury)—a tie-in to his BBC series of the same name—climbs 13 places into third position.
New entries into the Official UK Top 50 include the mass-market edition of the third book in Joanne Harris' Chocolat series, Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé (Black Swan); Derek Landy's The Maleficent Seven (HarperCollins); and Jodi Picoult's The Storyteller (Hodder & Stoughton). The latter was the bestselling hardback novel in the UK last week, scoring Picoult her first Original Fiction number one since May 2010.
Peppa Pig: Peppa's Easter Egg Hunt (Ladybird); Easter Bunny's Surprise (Igloo Books); The Easter Colouring Book (Buster Books); and two books by Fiona Watt (Easter Sticker Book and That's Not My Bunny) proved the bestselling Easter-themed publications in the UK last week, all selling more than 1,000 copies. In addition, the likes of Emma Goldhawk's Snuggle Bunny (Templar); Hello Bunny (Parragon); and Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit: Easter Surprise (Frederick Warne), all saw their sales climb by more than 50% week on week.
News from the Association of British Travel Agents that many shivering Britons have been snapping up last-minute overseas holidays to escape the coldest March on record is backed up in book sales data. DK Top 10 guides to Amsterdam, Venice, Malta, Florence and Madrid all saw their sales jump by more than 20% week on week, while there were also big boosts for Lonely Planet guides to Andalucia, Barcelona and France, and Rough Guides to Paris and Venice.
Other books enjoying sales uplifts last week included George R R Martin's Game of Thrones novels, sales of which increased by 65% ahead of the third season of the fantasy series' adaptation hitting UK TV screens, while works by the late Chinua Achebe received a 465% sales uplift following the writer's death on 21st March.
There was also a curious boost for economist Ha-Joon Chang. Sales of his 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (Penguin) increased 104% week on week, appearing to largely come about through its appearance in a question (and failed answer) in a recent episode of "University Challenge".