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“Super Thursday” helped book stores to an 11% upswing in sales last week, with books continuing to defy the wider retail gloom. Last Thursday publishers released 800 new books, triple the daily average, including dozens of new non-fiction hardback titles expected to become Christmas bestsellers. The blitz was picked up by the media, with the Guardian devoting its page three to the book surge.
According to Nielsen BookScan the Total Consumer Market rose 11.3% by value week-on-week, with the number of books shifted up by 5.8%. Year-on-year value sales were down marginally, but volume sales stayed in the black, up by almost 1%. In total 31 hardback non-fiction titles, led by Guinness World Records 2009, sold more than 2,000 copies in the week, down by just two on the 33 books that passed the same sales mark in the comparable week last year before the credit crunch took a grip.
Of the titles released last Thursday, Jamie’s Ministry of Food was the topseller, in at number three on the hardback non-fiction chart, selling 26,050 copies. Michael Parkinson and Dawn French debuted at fourth and fifth respectively.
"It went very well overall," said David Cooke, category manager at Tesco, "it kicked off our book sales for Christmas." Cooke said that the sales for Jamie Oliver’s book had been good, along with some strong competition from Paul O’Grady, Dawn French, Nigella Lawson and Michael Parkinson.
Michael Jones, senior fiction buyer at Borders, said: "It was quite a lot of work in stores - people put in a lot of hard work, but it was completely worth it, there was some great footfall."
Steph Bateson, book buyer at Asda, said that their two stand-out bestsellers were the Dawn French and Michael Parkinson memoirs.