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Sales of the titles on the Man Booker longlist increased by 60% following its announcement last Tuesday (28th July).
Although Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (Virago) remains the sales leader, its 4.4% sales boost week on week (to 1,556 copies sold) was the lowest of the 11 titles published thus far. James Scudamore’s Heliopolis (Harvill Secker) enjoyed the strongest sales boost—selling 100 copies last week, up from just three copies the previous week, while Ed O’Loughlin’s Not Untrue & Not Unkind (Penguin) sold 107 copies, up from five copies and Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze (Cape) sold 223 copies, up from 37 sold.
According to Nielsen BookScan, sales are up significantly on last year. Salman Rushdie’s longlisted The Enchantress of Florence (Cape) was the top seller in the equivalent week last year, selling 698 copies; this year Waters’ book, James Lever’s Me Cheeta (Fourth Estate), Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate) and A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book (Chatto) all outsold that figure last week.
Since BookScan began in 1998, Man Booker winners have accumulated sales of nearly four million (3,980,000). The all-time bestseller list comprises: The Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Canongate), The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (Virago), The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Atlantic), Vernon God Little by D B C Pierre (Faber) and Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (Vintage).