You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Stephen Fry has retained top spot in this week's Official UK Top 50, despite a 24% sales decline week-on-week.
His second memoir, The Fry Chronicles (Michael Joseph), sold 28,341 copies in its first full week in bookshops, down from 37,325 copies in its opening week. Lee Child's 14th Jack Reacher thriller, 61 Hours (Bantam), holds second position week-on-week, while Paul O'Grady's second memoir, The Devil Rides Out (Bantam Press), climbs eight places into third position overall thanks to a 17% uplift in week-on-week sales.
Child's 61 Hours remains the bestselling mass-market fiction title in the UK for a fourth consecutive week. Only nine other authors in the past five years have achieved this feat, most recently by Transworld stablemate Dan Brown whose The Lost Symbol topped The Bookseller's mass-market fiction chart for six consecutive weeks earlier this year.
Last week proved a strong one for Transworld who secure five of the Top 10 positions in the Official UK Top 50. As well as Lee Child and Paul O'Grady, its books by Jilly Cooper, Dan Brown and Andy McNab are also among the top 10 bestsellers. It is the first time a publisher has had five of the top 10 bestselling books in a single week since Little, Brown achieved the feat in January last year.
This week's highest new entry (in 21st position) in the Official UK Top 50 is novelist Rosie Thomas' Lovers and Newcomers (HarperCollins), which Daily Mail readers can currently get for half-price at Waterstones.com. Her previous book, Constance (HarperCollins), has sold 85,000 copies to date.
Other new entries into the Top 50 include: Glenn Cooper's The Tenth Chamber (Arrow), last week's half-price book-of-the-week at WH Smith, and John Irving's Last Night in Twisted River (Black Swan), the "£2.99 if you buy the Times" link-save deal at the same retailer.
Also new, and débuting in 32nd position overall, is Jonathan Franzen's hotly-anticipated Freedom (Fourth Estate). The well-reviewed novel sold 8,712 copies in its opening week in bookshops, some 7,500 copies more than his previous novel, The Corrections (Fourth Estate), sold in its first week on sale. The Corrections has since gone on to sell 187,000 copies in the UK.
However, Franzen, for now at least, has to settle for third position in this week's Original Fiction Top 20, behind John lé Carre's Our Kind of Traitor (Viking) and Jilly Cooper's Jump! (Bantam Press), which holds on to top spot for a second week with an impressive 19,952 sale.
The 29,695 sales of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (Bloomsbury) last week were split between its original mass-market edition and the new film tie-in edition, which take places one and two in this week's Paperback Non-fiction list. Poor reviews for the film don't seem to have affected sales too much with them up 40% week-on-week.
Meanwhile, annual publications are beginning to hit bestseller lists. Guinness World Records 2011, which in each of the past two years has sold more than 600,000 copies, sold 20,095 copies at UK booksellers last week, at a heavy 54% discount off its £20 r.r.p. on average. Peppa Pig: The Official Annual (Ladybird) was the bestselling children's annual last week, while Doctor Who (BBC), Disney Princess (Egmont), Beano (D C Thomson), The Big Book of Top Gear (BBC), Top Gear (BBC), and Disney Pixar (Egmont) also all sold more than 3,000 copies last week.
In total, £32.4m was spent on books in the UK last week, up 0.6% week-on-week but down 5.2% on the same week last year when the hardback edition of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (Bantam Press) sold 175,000 copies, taking £1.5m through the tills alone.