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David Nicholls' One Day (Hodder) sold almost twice as many copies as the next bestselling title in 2011, romping to the summit of The Bookseller's Official UK Top 50 for 2011.
One Day sold 988,165 print copies through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market (TCM), almost 476,000 copies better than the 504,557 copies shifted by second-placed Jamie Oliver's Jamie's 30-minute Meals (Michael Joseph).
For the first time, all physical editions of the featured books were ranked as one—though with sales of 637,969 copies, One Day's original paperback edition alone would have claimed the top spot. The film tie-edition would have come eighth.
Oliver's 2010 record-setting 30-minute Meals continued to sell well into early 2011, and outsold his newest book—the Christmas 2011 number one, Jamie's Great Britain (Michael Joseph)—by 65%.
As to be expected in a year in which the overall TCM shrank 6.3% (£106m) year on year by value—due largely to the migration to digital—bestselling titles suffered a decline. Only One Day and 30-Minute Meals sold more than 500,000 copies last year, compared to seven titles in 2010. In value terms, 73 titles took more than £1m through the tills in 2011, down from 76 the previous year.
Guinness World Records 2012 took third place last year, shifting 491,491 copies. However, this is a 7% decline on the previous edition's sales. In a tough Christmas for celebrity memoirs Lee Evans' The Life of Lee (Penguin) came out tops with 266,351 copies sold. Yet Evans was the only celeb to hit the 200,000 mark, a feat achieved by seven in 2010. Dawn French was the bestselling début novelist of 2011, and had the second bestselling novel with A Tiny Bit Marvellous, which sold 471,825 copies. Débuts by Kathryn Stockett, Rosamund Lupton, Sarah Winman and Téa Obreht also sold comfortably into six figures in 2011.
Terry Prachett's Snuff (Doubleday) was the bestselling Original Fiction book of the year, with 237,733 copies sold. Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes (Vintage), at 250,697 copies, pipped Bill Bryson's At Home (Transworld) to the top of Paperback Non-fiction—by just 400 copies.
Jeff Kinney took the top six spots in the Children's Top 20, with all of his Wimpy Kid novels selling more than 200,000 copies. Jennifer Egan's Orange Prize-shortlisted A Visit from the Goon Squad (Corsair) topped the 2011 Heatseekers with sales of 65,176 copies.
A full 2011 chart, and a comprehensive breakdown of the figures, can be accessed here.