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W H Smith has said it has been "blown away" by the results of its Richard & Judy promotion with just short of a million pounds being spent on the eight books since the promotion began on 2nd September.
According to Nielsen BookScan, £994,950 has been spent on 217,700 copies of the titles included. The Snowman by Jo Nesbo (Vintage) has been the most popular, selling 62,684 copies, followed by Sister by Rosamund Lupton (Piatkus) with 62,089.
The retailer said Sister was the biggest-selling title at WHS last week and the author has become the fastest-selling debut author in WHS since records began. Judy Finnigan said: "We are thrilled for all our authors, especially Rosamund. What a debut."
The sales of other titles since the promotion began are: A Place of Secrets by Rachel Hore (Pocket Books) selling 27,664 copies; Operation Mincemeat by Ben MacIntyre (Bloomsbury) selling 22,222 copies; The Crying Tree by Naseem Rakha (Macmillan) with 15,714 copies sold; Waiting for Columbus by Thomas Trofimuk (Picador) selling 9,865; The Wilding by Maria McCann (Faber) with 9,865 copies and No and Me by Delphine de Vigan (Bloomsbury) selling 7,913.
From these figures, the WHS market share of the selected titles is estimated to be upwards of 70%.
Rachel Russell, books business unit director at W H Smith, said: "We had high expectations for the promotion but the results have blown us away. I have to say our stores have been absolutely brilliant in getting behind the review titles and we have had overwhelmingly good feedback from the publishers and authors about the strength of our displays.
"Richard and Judy have selected a strong and varied list, we are really pleased."
Total sales of the eight titles equalled 82,348 copies last week (2% of all book sales), up 7% week on week. Sales of the 'featured book' A Place of Secrets jumped 45% week on week and was the 11th bestselling mass-market novel of the week.
Sales are significantly up (54%) on sales of the last retailer-supported R&J book club in 2009 when the duo were on UKTV's Watch channel, although they are down 42% on sales of the 2008 Summer Read when Richard and Judy's popular book club was on Channel Four.