You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Father's Day purchasing pushed book sales up 7.5% week-on-week to £29.3m, continuing a four-week run of growth for the book trade this summer. Spending on books during the seven days to 19th June represented an 11-week high, but sales were down 3.4% on the same week last year when Antony Beevor's D-Day (Viking) took £840,000 through the tills alone
Stephenie Meyer retained top spot in a week of big sales boosts for numerous titles thanks to Father's Day. The Second Life of Bree Tanner (Atom) sold 50,902 copies in the UK last week, some 9,291 copies more than the next most popular purchase, James Patterson's 16th Alex Cross thriller, I Alex Cross (Arrow). Sales of the latter were helped by a "link-save" offer at W H Smith where shoppers could buy the title for only £2.99 if they spent £10 on books.
A half-price book-of-the-week spot at the same retailer helped Maeve Binchy's short-story collection, The Return Journey (Orion), sell 37,284 copies last week and take third position in the Official UK Top 50, while a "£2.99 if you buy the Times" link-save deal at W H Smith, and a half price paperback book-of-the-week spot at Sainsbury's helped sales of Gerald Seymour's The Collaborator (Hodder) which débuts in 12th position as this week's highest new entry.
Bill Bryson's At Home (Doubleday) retains its number one spot in hardback non-fiction having received a 29% sales boost week-on-week in the seven days to 19th June. There were also big Father's Day boosts for the hardback likes of Top Gear: The Alternative Highway Code (BBC, up 79%), Fred Dibnah and David Hall's Foundries and Rolling Mills (BBC, up 197%), Hugh Ambrose's The Pacific (Canongate, up 161%), and David Lloyd's Start the Car (HarperSport, up 42%).
In paperback non-fiction, too, many titles received big week-on-week uplifts including Jeremy Clarkson's Driven to Distraction (Penguin, up 76%), Antony Beevor's D-Day (Penguin, up 87%), Andy McNab's Spoken From the Front (Corgi, up 68%) and Justin Halpern's Shit My Dad Says (Boxtree, up 57%).
Other more obvious Father's Day titles to enjoy success last week include To My Daddy, John Gribble's The Grandads' Book, Michael Heatley's The Dads' Book (all Michael O'Mara), children's laureate Anthony Browne's My Dad (Doubleday), and Nick Butterworth's My Dad is Brilliant (Walker)—all of which sold more than 1,000 copies according to Nielsen BookScan data.
Meanwhile, sales of Barbara Kingsolver's Orange Prize for Fiction winner, The Lacuna (Faber), which was the bestselling book at independent bookshops last week, jumped 83% week-on-week helped by a till-point link-save spot at Waterstone's.