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"The TV Book Club" on More 4 and Channel 4 scooped a bigger audience this week, picking up a peak average audience just short of 500,000 viewers overall. However, total weekly sales of the 10 titles saw a slight drop after transmission of the first show.
The More4 broadcast on Sunday evening attracted 303,000 viewers, peaking at 364,000 according to independent monitoring panel Broadcast Audience Research Board (BARB). The daytime Channel 4 broadcast on Monday averaged 101,000 viewers, peaking at 114,000. Again the audience was described as ABC1 by the channel, which said the figures were a 39% increase on last week. Last week's broadcasts drew a combined average audience of just under 350,000.
However, sales of the 10 titles have not been straightforward, with three titles seeing sales grow week-on-week. Figures from Nielsen BookScan up to 26th January show sales of the first week's choice The Little Stranger drop, with Waters' title selling 16,348 copies in the week after the first show, compared with 16,488 copies the week before. But the following week's pick Blacklands by Belinda Bauer saw a boost from sales of 5,125 to 5,410, while both Sacred Hearts and Cutting for Stone also saw uplifts. Overall, the 10 'best reads' sold less in the week after the first show aired than they did in the previous week.
The second show was widely thought to have been an improvement on the the first, with Amanda Ross, m.d. Cactus admitting that "we did some things wrong" with the debut episode. Publishers and retailers won't know until next week, however, whether the increased viewing figures will lead to increased book sales.