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Sales of hardbacks through Nielsen BookScan's top 5,000 chart jumped 11% week on week last week, with early sales of this year's crop of celebrity memoirs helping boost the hardback non-fiction sector by 35%.
According to Nielsen, more than 200 hardback books hit bookshop shelves on Super Thursday (11th October)—three times the daily average—with 21 of these posting sales of 1,000 copies or more last week. Fourteen Super Thursday releases enter this week's Official UK Top 50, led by singer Cheryl Cole's memoir, Cheryl: My Story (Harper). The book sold 26,361 copies in its three days on sale last week, making it the fastest-selling hardback non-fiction book of the year.
Despite sales of hardback non-fiction titles soaring week on week, paperback sales through Nielsen BookScan's top 5,000 chart slumped 12%. Overall sales in the week ending 13th October were down 4.8% (£1.6m) on the previous week, although BookScan General Retail Market data suggests sales on the high street were relatively flat (-0.7%). Spending was down 4.5% (£1.5m) on the same week last year, but up 0.7% (£216,000) on the week of "Super Thursday" (ending 1st October).
Despite Cheryl Cole's strong opening-week sale, it misses out on the Official UK Top 50 top spot which is held by J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy (Little, Brown) for a third week. It is the first time since June 2010, when Stephenie Meyer's The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner achieved the feat, that publisher Little, Brown has enjoyed three consecutive weeks atop the summit of the Official UK Top 50.
Other new entries into the Official UK Top 50 include: Rod Stewart's memoir, Rod: The Autobiography (Century), sales of which were helped by a serialisation in the Daily Mail and his appearances on "Daybreak", "Lorraine" and Steve Wright's BBC Radio 2 show; comedienne Miranda Hart's Is it Just Me? (Hodder); pop band McFly's Unsaid Things (Bantam Press); and Paul O'Grady's third memoir, Still Standing: The Savage Years (Bantam Press). O'Grady's first memoir, At My Mother's Knee… (Bantam Books), has taken an incredible £8.5m through bookshop tills since its release in 2008, and is second only to Peter Kay's The Sound of Laughter (Arrow) as the bestselling celebrity memoir since records began.
A number of works of fiction by some of the UK's bestselling writers also hit the shelves on Super Thursday, with Terry Pratchett's collected fiction spanning his entire career, A Blink of the Screen (Doubleday), proving the pick of the bunch. The £20 hardback sold 6,920 copies in its first three days on sale—strong enough for 32nd position in this week's Official UK Top 50 and third position, behind The Casual Vacancy and Bernard Cornwell's 1356 (HarperCollins), in this week's Original Fiction bestseller chart.
Other hardback fiction titles released on Super Thursday earning places in The Bookseller's bestseller lists this week include: Jo Nesbø's first Harry Hole thriller, The Bat (Harvill Secker); Cecelia Ahern's One Hundred Names (HarperCollins); and Judy Finnigan's début novel, Eloise (Sphere). However, titles such as comedian David Mitchell's Back Story (HarperCollins); Michael Palin's Brazil (Weidenfeld); Will Young's Funny Peculiar (Sphere); and the "Autobidography" of "Britain's Got Talent" winner Pudsey, all fell short of bestseller list status.