You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Physical sales of Sir Alex Ferguson's memoir, My Autobiography (Hodder & Stoughton), soared 18% last week, further securing him at the summit of the official book charts.
My Autobiography sold 82,631 copies in the seven-day period ending 7th December, according to Nielsen BookScan—almost 30,000 copies more than the next bestselling book of the week, Guinness World Records (53,291 sold).
Total sales of My Autobiography have now surged past the 500,000 barrier. Since it hit shelves on 24th October, the £25 hardback has sold 567,605 copies—a rate of 13,500 copies every day, or 560 per hour.
In just 42 days, My Autobiography has become the 25th bestselling hardback non-fiction book since official sales records began and is now just 68,000 copies shy of the 635,000 record for a sports memoir set by his former protégé David Beckham's My Side (HarperCollinsWillow).
Just shy of £1m was spent on copies of Ferguson's book in a week when the value of the printed book market jumped by almost £12m. Nielsen BookScan data reveals sales of printed books rocketed 28% (£11.7m) on the previous week, to £53.7m — down just 1.7% (£0.9m) on the same week last year when Jamie Oliver's 15-Minute Meals (Michael Joseph) topped the Official UK Top 50 with a 94,501 sale.
Helen Fielding's new Bridget Jones novel, Mad About the Boy (Cape), returns to top spot in this week's Original Fiction chart helped by a 35% uplift in sales, while James Patterson takes the top two positions in this week's Mass-Market Fiction chart, with 12th of Never (co-written with Maxine Paetro) and Merry Christmas, Alex Cross (both published by Arrow). Patterson becomes the first writer since E L James last year to earn the two spots in the Mass-Market Fiction chart in the same week.
UK Top 10 (week ending 7th December 2013)
1. Alex Ferguson's My Autobiography (Hodder & Stoughton) 82,631 copies sold
2. Guinness World Records 2014 (Guinness) 53,291
3. Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck (Puffin) 50,486
4. David Jason's My Life (Century) 41,801
5. Minecraft: Official Annual 2014 (Egmont) 39,980
6. Minecraft: Redstone Handbook (Egmont) 33,917
7. David Walliams' Demon Dentist (HarperCollins Children's) 31,775
8. Brendan O'Carroll's Mrs Brown's Family Handbook (Michael Joseph) 31,290
9. One Direction: The Official Annual 2014 (HarperCollins Children's) 31,162
10. Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (Cape) 23,311