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E L James has broken J K Rowling's annual sales record as she begins a sixth month at the summit of the UK bestseller lists.
In total, £879,000 was spent on print editions of of James' Fifty Shades novels in the seven days to 1st September—including £12,850 spent on new hardback editions of the books—taking her sales past the annual author sales record of £42.6m set by Rowling in 2007.
According to Nielsen BookScan Total Consumer Market data, £42,954,000 has now been spent on copies of James' erotic trilogy in 2012, with volume sales likely to pass the 10m mark within the next month.
Book three in James' trilogy, Fifty Shades Freed (Arrow), retains top spot in the Official UK Top 50 with a seven-day sale of 67,225 copies. Books two and one in the series, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades of Grey, retain second and third place respectively with sales of 64,375 and 60,253.
Sylvia Day's Bared to You (Penguin) was once again the fourth bestselling book of the week, while Lee Child's new Jack Reacher thriller A Wanted Man (Bantam Press), hits the chart in fifth place with the strongest weekly sale from a hardback novel this year.
The latter sold 24,257 copies at UK booksellers last week, beating the previous record of 23,091 set by Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate) in May.
A Wanted Man is one of 15 new entries into the Official UK Top 50—four of which are members of Richard and Judy’s latest book club: Robert Goddard’s Fault Line (Corgi); Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (Headline Review); Anthony Horowitz’ The House of Silk (Orion), and Elizabeth Noble’s Between a Mother and Child (Penguin).
In total, £216,000 was spent on 47,000 copies of the 10 members of the duo’s Autumn 2012 club—up 10% on the first week sales of the comparative 2011 club last year. However, it is worth noting that there are two more members this year's Autumn Club than last year (10, instead of eight), while sales of four of the titles (The Snow Child, The House of Silk, Secrets of the Tides and The Greatcoat) will have been helped by the fact they are also included in Waterstones’ Autumn Book Club.
In total, £25.2m was spent on printed books at UK booksellers in the seven days to 1st September, down 7.3% (£2m) year on year but up very marginally, by 0.1% or £28,000, week on week.
According to Nielsen BookScan top 5,000 data, booksellers found week on week gains in markets geared towards “Back to School” season, with specialist non-fiction sales up 30% and the dictionaries and thesauri genre—a market decimated by the growth of online resources within the past decade—enjoying a 50% uplift.