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E L James' Fifty Shades trilogy has once again shattered records, as The Bookseller reported yesterday.
A week after Fifty Shades of Grey (Arrow) obliterated Dan Brown's record for sales in one week for an adult paperback, the erotica author did it again. Or rather, she did it three times, as each book in the trilogy eclipsed the previous week's benchmark of 205,130 copies sold through Nielsen BookScan.
Fifty Shades of Grey (397,889 copies), Fifty Shades Darker (245,801) and Fifty Shades Freed (212,832) collectively sold 856,522 copies last week for a total of just under £3.9m. The trilogy's first book now holds the all-time overall paperback weekly record.
Fifty Shades of Grey is now the 32nd bestselling book since BookScan records began and the quickest adult paperback novel to surpass one million copies sold (1,162,063), a feat achieved in just 11 official weeks of sales. It took the paperback of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (Corgi), the bestselling book of all time at over 4.5 million copies, 36 weeks to hit that total.
James' three books outsold the rest of the BookScan top 50 by approximately two to one in units (855,424 to 392,288) and value (£3.9m to £2.1m).
James was responsible for an astonishing 14.6% (£3.9m out of £26.7m) of all value sales through BookScan's TCM last week, and 21% of all volume. These are weekly figures only eclipsed by J K Rowling (42% of volume and 47% of value for the first week of sales for the last Harry Potter). Yet it beats Dan Brown's first week Lost Symbol hardback (Transworld) TCM market share. In that week in September 2009, The Lost Symbol was responsible for 12.4% of all volume sales, 13% of value.
With a raft of copycat books being hurried out, publishers are betting the E L James effect will lead to a booming erotica sub-genre. We have seen some evidence of this last week. Lucinda Carrington's The Ninety Days of Genevieve has cracked The Bookseller Heatseekers chart, the bestselling books outside the Top 50 by authors who have never previously been in the Top 50.
Though one of the first post-Fifty Shades books, Ninety Days not really a copycat, but a precursor. First published in 1996 by Black Lace, it was rush re-released last week. With the barest of marketing and little design, the cover has a plain grey background, white lettering, but a pink sticker that says: "If you loved Fifty Shades of Grey, you'll love this", and sold 1,248 copies.
But whether the Fifty Shades effect will be a market boon overall is arguable. Despite James' mammoth sales, the TCM's value declined 3.6% week on week post Father's Day to £26.7m, although it was up 2.3% on the same week in 2011. No mass market paperback sold more than 20,000 copies except for the Fifty Shades trilogy last week; in the previous week five books did, and on this week in 2011 seven eclipsed 20,000.
The most high-profile launch of the week was Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's The Long Earth (Transworld), which sold 13,991 units. This is a very good result for original fiction in June; on the same week in 2011 Wilbur Smith's Those in Peril (Pan Mac) sold 8,779 copies. Similarly, Katie Price's In the Name of Love (Century) shifted 4,435 copies in its launch week; her hardback novel in June 2011 notched up sales of 8,295 in its first week.
Still, there were 12 new entries to the Top 50 this week, including Penny Vincenzi's The Decision (Headline Review) which debuted at number five with 15,136 units shifted, Lauren Kate's conclusion to her Fallen YA paranormal series Rapture (Doubleday) and the paperback of Harlan Coben's first YA novel, Shelter (Orion).
Meanwhile Ben Aaronovitch notches up his first Top 50 appearance (49th place, 4,481 copies) with Whispers Underground (Gollancz), the latest in his urban fantasy Rivers of London series.