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The book trade bounced back last week after seven consecutive weeks of poor sales compared to last year, with turnover up 3.4%. The bestseller in a good week for the trade was once again Jamie Oliver, whose Jamie's 30-minute Meals (Michael Joseph), came up with the strongest ever sale for a book in November since Nielsen BookScan records began.
In total, £36.5m was spent at UK bookshops, up £1.2m on the comparative seven-day period last year. Sales through the seven days to 6th November were also up 1.4% (£0.5m) week-on-week. It ends a poor run of book sales that began in September due to the release of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (Bantam Press) in hardback last year. That week (ending 18th September), sales were down 7.8% year-on-year in value terms, and began a seven-week run of year-on-year sales decline during which time £8.5m less was spent at booksellers in 2010.
In the week that his Channel Four series of the same name ended, Jamie's 30-minute Meals (Michael Joseph), sold a massive 90,141 copies—the strongest ever sale for a book in November. It outsold the next most popular purchase of the week, Guinness World Records (31,177 copies sold) by almost three copies to one, and is on track to become the bestselling hardback non-fiction book since records began. Penguin deputy c.e.o. Tom Weldon said the publisher would have 1.7m copies of the book in print by Christmas.
Total sales currently stand at 361,341 copies—putting it comfortably in a Top 50 list of the bestselling hardback non-fiction books of the 21st century. It has passed the 350,000 mark much faster than Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Peter Kay's The Sound of Laughter, and his own Jamie's Italy—the three bestselling hardback non-fiction books in the 21st century.
Keith Richards' Life (Orion) was once again the bestselling celebrity memoir of the week, and holds third position overall, while TV star Aleksandr Orlov's A Simples Life (Ebury) climbs three places into sixth place thanks to a 38% boost in sales week-on-week.
New entries into the Official UK Top 50 include Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's 13th Wheel of Time novel, Towers of Midnight (Orbit), which sold 15,731 copies in just five days, and Jeffrey Archer's And Thereby Hangs a Tale (Pan), which sold 12,829 copies thanks in part to a half-price "book-of-the-week" push at W H Smith.
Towers of Midnight settles for second position in this week's Original Fiction chart behind John Grisham's The Confession (Century)—the new number one. Meanwhile, in mass-market fiction, Kate Mosse's The Winter Ghosts (Orion) holds top spot for a second week.
There are four débuts in this week's Top 20 Paperback Non-fiction chart—three of them pet memoirs. Megan Rix's The Puppy That Came for Christmas (Penguin) débuts in 10th while Pen Farthing's One Dog at a Time (Ebury) and Isabel George's Beyond the Call of Duty (Harper) join in 12th and 20th place respectively. Also new is Neil Forsyth's mischievous collection of correspondences with internet spammers, Delete This at Your Peril (Birlinn).
In children's, sales of annuals were up week-on-week but remain down on last year. According to Nielsen BookScan data, 41 annuals sold more than 1,000 copies at UK booksellers last week—exactly the same number as in the same week last year, but combined volume sales were down approximately 17%. Meanwhile, Rachel Caine's new Morganville Vampires thriller, Ghost Town (Allison & Busby), débuts at number one in the fiction list, as TV star David Walliams' Billionaire Boy (HarperCollins) joins in eighth place.