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Sales of Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck, the eighth book in the series from Jeff Kinney, have reached more than 1.3m copies in its first week of sale, Penguin has announced.
The figure applies to sales worldwide and across all formats. The total number of copies in print worldwide is now 115m.
In the US, the book has chalked up the biggest weekly sales total this year, edging Dan Brown's Inferno. Hard Luck sold 383,517 print units through Nielsen BookScan US last week, beating 2013's previous best, the 367,545 units that Inferno shifted in the week ending 19th May. In fact, Hard Luck has notched up the biggest weekly total since E L James' Fifty Shades of Grey sold just over 400,000 copies in the last week of May 2012.
In the UK, the book is currently top of the bestseller charts, having knocked Alex Ferguson’s autobiography off the number one spot.
Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck shifted 82,999 units through Nielsen BookScan, in one week selling more than a 10th of Puffin's 800,000 print run. It is the biggest weekly sales total for a kid's title since Kinney's own Diary Of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel, which sold just over 91,000 copies in the third week of November 2012. Last week's haul brings Kinney's all-time UK sales for the eight Wimpy Kid books to just over 6 million units, for £33.4m.
Kinney will visit the UK next month for "large scale 1,000-seater live events" in Birmingham, Kingston and Dublin. Puffin has organised a major publicity campaign for the book which includes national TV and national rail advertising, as well as online consumer and nationwide schools and libraries promotions.