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Last week saw £23.4m of book sales registered through Nielsen BookScan; its highest value since the run-up to Mother's Day when just over £24m was spent on books.
Value sales were up 3.2% week on week and a whopping 8.4% up on the same week last year-a difference of £1.8m. nearly 40% of this came from sales of the top 5,000 titles, which were up 6.8% to £11m.
John Green is now tied with Dan Brown for most weeks in the number one spot in 2014, with five consecutive weeks for The Fault in Our Stars (Penguin) selling 27,383 copies in the week and the film tie-in edition enjoying its fourth week at number three selling an additional 16,780. Combined sales (44,163) for the tear-jerker novel were down 15% week on week but sales of the standard edition in first place were still strong enough to keep John Grisham from reaching the summit. Sycamore Row (Hodder) climbed two places to number two selling 24,714 copies-up 41% week on week.
This time last year Grisham climbed one place to hit number one with his last paperback thriller, The Racketeer (Hodder), which sold 29,782 copies week ending 13th July 2013 and has gone on to sell 288,245 over the year and has sold over 1,300 in the last four weeks.
Two authors appear in the top 10 this week, which were in the top 10 this time last year. In addition to Grisham, James Oswald scores a second week in the chart with the fourth installment of his crime series featuring Inspector McLean: Dead Men's Bones-another hit for Penguin. The thriller slips one place to nine but rose in sales week on week by 6.5% shifting 10,960 copies. The novel has sold 21,461 physical copies so far and has outsold its predecessor The Book of Souls, which had sold 19,914 at the same point in its chart run last year.
Despite selling 170,271 mass market paperback copies of How to be a Woman (Ebury) Caitlin Moran has surprisingly never had a Non-fiction number one, however she scores with her "debut grown-up" novel How to Build a Girl (Ebury, 6,919 copies), which climbs one place to take the top spot in the Original Fiction chart, usurping Robert Galbraith's The Silkworm (Sphere) after a three week run at the top.
With 14 weeks at number one, Minecraft The Official Construction Handbook (Egmont) has now spent more weeks as the number one children's book in the UK than Diary of a Wimpy Kid instalments The Third Wheel, Cabin Fever, Hard Luck (Puffin) and the first part of The Hunger Games. Since the start of 2010, only the third part of the Twilight series Eclipse (Atom, 16 weeks) and Gangsta Granny (HarperCollins Children's), which has enjoyed 23 weeks across two editions (21 weeks for the paperback and two weeks for the hardback) have spent more weeks at the top but the Construction Handbook has sold more copies than either of Meyer's or Walliam's blockbusters during its (non-consecutive) run at number one during this period. The handbook to the wildly popular computer game has sold 280,286 copies while it has occupied the top spot (Eclipse did however sell more copies overall during its tenure at the top; including sales in 2009 it sold 519,810 at number one).
There were no changes to the non-fiction charts with Bill Bryson taking a sixth week at the top of the paperback charts. Sales of One Summer (Black Swan) have yet to fall below selling 5,000 copies per week. Hillary Rodham Clinton continues to defy pundits, who said her memoir, Hard Choices (Simon & Schuster) would not be a hit. The hardback, which is a non-mover at the top of the Non-fiction hardback list has now sold just under 25,000 (24,918) copies in six weeks for a combined value to the trade of over £280,000.