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Orion’s Michael Connelly’s e-book sales have passed the one million mark with Hachette UK’s head of digital George Walkley saying digital sales are not yet plateauing in the UK.
Connelly [pictured left with deputy publishing director Bill Massey] is the second Hachette author to reach the landmark digital sales figure, and the first to do it under a single author name. Little, Brown imprint Piatkus recently celebrated one million e-book sales for Nora Roberts and her literary alter-ego J D Robb. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) has sold over 500,000 e-books across Orion’s territories, the publisher said.
Commenting on Connelly and Roberts, Walkley said: “Digital sales make up a sizeable percentage of most authors’ sales, particularly in fiction, but even so a million copies coming from over 190 territories is a remarkable achievement and it is a real pleasure to celebrate these landmark digital sales for two of our most popular authors.”
Although the rate of growth for e-book sales is slowing, Hachette UK has still seen plenty of success in 2013, Walkley told The Bookseller. “It has been a very strong third quarter for e-book sales,” he said. “We did see a peak in August. Many retailers were running their own summer promotions—at Hachette we ran a crime promotion with a number of retailers. September and October were not as strong as August levels, but they were still holding up very strongly indeed. We are not seeing a plateau in the market.”
He added: “Is the rate of growth slowing off? That’s certainly true. Last year or the year before you were seeing triple-digit growth and that is not sustainable forever. We are still seeing strong growth month-to-month.” Growth was across a number of titles and genres, according to Walkley, with Sir Alex Ferguson’s memoir also doing well digitally.
“It feels like a strong tablet Christmas this year,” he added. “What’s going to be interesting in 2014 is whether we see tablet use of illustrated content like children’s books. The challenge we have got to be aware of is that they’re multi-use devices, so we’re competing with apps, games and video content, too.”