You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Hairy Bikers Dave Myers and Si King have extended their reign at the summit of the official bestseller lists for a second consecutive week. Their low-calorie/big-flavour diet book, The Hairy Dieters (Weidenfeld), suffered a 17% drop in sales week on week, but it nonetheless tops the Official UK Top 50 with a lead of more than 10,000 copies.
The paperback cookbook, enjoying big sales in New Year New You season five months after it first hit bookshop shelves, sold 30,758 copies in the UK last week, taking £250,000 through bookshop tills.
The final novel in the late Robert Jordan's epic fantasy series Wheel of Time (Orbit), débuts in second position in this week's Official UK Top 50, and has become the fastest-selling hardback novel for adult audiences since J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy (Little, Brown) in September last year. A Memory of Light (Orbit), completed by Brandon Sanderson, sold 20,336 copies in its opening week on bookshop shelves—more than four times the sales of the next bestselling hardback novel of the week, James Patterson and Mark Sullivan's Private Berlin (Century).
Patterson's Kill Me if You Can (Arrow), co-written with Marshall Karp, proved the bestselling paperback novel of the week, selling 18,312 copies. It takes third position in the Official UK Top 50, and top spot in this week's Mass-market Fiction bestseller list. It is Patterson's first mass-market chart-topper since March last year when 10th Anniversary topped the list with a sale of 15,457 copies. Due to the domination of the bestseller list by E L James over the summer, it proved the publishing juggernaut's only mass-market fiction number one of the year.
New entries into this week's Official UK Top 50 include the mass-market editions of Iain Banks' Stonemouth (Abacus); Lisa Gardner's Catch Me (Headline); and Laurent Binet's HHhH (Vintage)—one of the top 10 bestselling novels of the week at independent booksellers.
Also new are Paul McKenna's The Hypnotic Gastric Band (Bantam Press) and Nadia Sawalha's Greedy Girl's Diet (Kyle) which, like the Hairy Bikers, are enjoying popularity in New Year, New You season. Sales of the two titles rocketed by 609% and 384% week on week respectively last week. Other fitness and diet titles proving popular with New Year resolution makers include: Mimi Spencer and Michael Mosley's The Fast Diet (Short); Rosemary Conley's The FAB Diet (Arrow), and Kate Harrison's self-published The 5:2 Diet (Createspace)—currently one of the top 30 bestselling books on Amazon.co.uk.
In total, £23.3m was spent on printed books in the UK last week, up 1.4% week on week, but down marginally (-2.8%) on the same week last year. Although sales of fiction and non-fiction titles were ahead of last year, sales within the children's sector slumped, in part due to the huge sales of Michael Morpurgo's War Horse (Egmont) in the comparative seven-day period.