You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Transworld secured a double-whammy last week with Lee Child snapping up the top position in the overall Top 50 chart for the first time, and Joanna Trollope taking the top spot in the original fiction chart for the first hardback she has published with what was her paperback publisher before she moved from Bloomsbury.
But, Transworld aside, it was another dismal week for bookselling with sales in the Total Consumer Market down 7.8% year-on-year, a near negligible improvement on last week's drop of 8.3%. In total £28.5m passed through booksellers' tills in the week ending 20th February down 5% week-on-week.
Only one title achieved sales of more than 20,000 copies, Child's Gone Tomorrow, which sold 29,870 books at an average discount of 49%. In the same week last year five titles sold more than 20,000 copies.
Trollope's The Other Family sold just over 5,000 copies in her first week with her new hardback publisher: her previous book, Friday Nights, published by Bloomsbury, only climbed as high as fifth in the original fiction charts.
Behind Child, another notable new entrant in the mass market fiction chart was Val McDermid's The Fever of the Bone, which went straight in at nine. The book is her first with Sphere since she was poached from HarperCollins in late 2008. Her previous book in the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, Beneath the Bleeding, has sold 108,000 copies in paperback to date.