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Book sales soared by more than £2m last week as a bounty of new books hit the shelves on one of the biggest dates in the 2012 publishing calendar.
According to Nielsen BookScan Total Consumer Market data, £28.6m was spent on printed books in the seven days to 15th September - up 8.5% week on week and by the slimmest of margins (+0.1%, or +£20,000) on the same week last year.
Sales of hardbacks through BookScan's top 5,000 chart for the week were up 30% week on week, with sales of hardback novels up 35% and sales within the hardback non-fiction sector up 45%.
Thursday 13th September was one of the biggest dates of the year in terms of new releases, with more than 200 hardbacks officially published on the day - three times the daily average. A total of 56 earn places in BookScan's top 5,000 bestseller chart for the week, with 20 scoring sales of more than 1,000 copies.
Two hardbacks released on the day scored sales of more than 20,000 copies at UK booksellers, and both earn number ones in this week's Bookseller bestseller lists. Dodger (Doubleday), the Dickensian novel by Terry Pratchett (pictured), was comfortably the bestselling children's book of the week and takes pole position in the Children’s Fiction chart, while Martina Cole's The Life (Headline), easily the bestselling hardback novel for adult audiences in the week, takes top spot in The Bookseller's Original Fiction list.
It scores Cole her 10th consecutive Original Fiction number one as each of her novels dating back to 2002's Maura's Game have reached top spot in the chart.
The two titles settle for sixth and seventh position overall in The Official UK Top 50 which, for a 22nd consecutive week, is topped by E L James. Fifty Shades Freed (Cornerstone), the third and final book in her erotic Fifty Shades series, retains pole position with a 40,392 sale. Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades of Grey retain second and third positions respectively with sales of 36,765 copies and 35,722 copies.
The Hairy Bikers' The Hairy Dieters (Weidenfeld) climbs one place into fourth position overall, with Sylvia Day's Bared to You (Penguin) falling one place into fifth.
Fifteen new entries grace the Official UK Top 50, led by Dodger and The Life. Others include: Vina Jackson's erotic novel Eighty Days Blue (Orion), the sequel to Eighty Days Yellow which has sold 84,000 copies in six weeks; Ken Follett's Winter of the World (Macmillan), the second book in his Century trilogy; the latest edition of fact compendium Guinness World Records (Guinness); and cookery queen Nigella Lawson's new cookbook Nigellissima (Chatto).
Other new entries across the fiction/non-fiction genre bestseller lists this week include: Sebastian Faulks' new novel A Possible Life (Hutchinson); Chris Ryan's thriller Osama (Coronet); Clare Balding's My Animals and Other Family (Viking) — a book many industry insiders are tipping to be a "dark horse" in sales terms this Christmas; Justin Bieber's Just Getting Started (HarperCollins); Jessica Fellowes' The Chronicles of Downton Abbey (Collins); and Olympic gold-medallist Victoria Pendleton's memoir Between the Lines (HarperSport).
However, a number of new releases miss out, with works by Wayne Rooney (My Decade in the Premier League, HarperSport); Peter Ackroyd (Tudors, Macmillan); and Sean Magee (Desert Island Discs: 70 Years of Castaways, Bantam Press) among those falling just short of cracking the bestseller lists.