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Sylvia Day's Entwined with You (Penguin), the third instalment in her Crossfire erotica series, has returned to the top of the UK book charts.
Print sales of the mass-market novel totalled 24,589 copies in the week ending 22nd June—down 44% week on week, but a shallower decline than the 65% fall suffered by last week's chart-topper, Dan Brown's Inferno (Bantam Press).
Brown's fall was emblematic of a general market-wide drop-off in sales of hardback books following a significant boost in the run-up to Father's Day. Sales of hardback titles through Nielsen BookScan's top 5,000 bestseller list for the week tumbled 28% week on week, but were up marginally year on year—by 0.2%.
In total, £21.8m was spent on printed books in the seven days to 22nd June—down 13.7% (£3.5m) on the previous week and down 18.2% (£4.8m) on the same week last year.
A significant factor behind the big decline in sales in comparison to last year is E L James, whose Fifty Shades series was selling in phenomenal, record-breaking numbers this time last year. Nielsen BookScan data reveals she was worth a massive £3.9m to the market in the week ending 23rd June 2012 with her three Fifty Shades novels combining to sell 857,000 copies—accounting for almost one in every five books purchased. Last week, James was worth just £19,000 to the market with the most valuable author to booksellers, Dan Brown, worth £211,000—just 5% of E L James' gargantuan figure in the same week last year.
Brown's new novel, Inferno, takes second position in this week's Official UK Top 50 with a sale of 18,775 copies. The mass-market edition of Karin Slaughter's Will Trent thriller, Criminal (Arrow), débuts as the highest new entry in third position, while Lauren Weisberger's much-anticipated sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada (Harper), also joins the top five.
Other new entries include the late Iain Banks' final novel, The Quarry (Little, Brown), Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's The Long War (Doubleday) and Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Headline Review). The latter sold 8,430 copies in its first week on bookshop shelves, smashing Gaiman's previous hardback weekly sales personal best of 2,683 copies—set by The Graveyard Book in December 2008.