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Jeff Kinney has notched up the biggest weekly sale for a children's book in over a year, booting Sir Alex Ferguson's My Autobiography off the top of the UK Official Top 50 Chart.
Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck shifted 82,999 units through Nielsen BookScan, in one week selling more than a 10th of Puffin's 800,000 print run. It is the biggest weekly sales total for a kid's title since Kinney's own Diary Of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel, which sold just over 91,000 copies in the third week of November 2012. Last week's haul brings Kinney's all-time UK sales for the eight Wimpy Kid books to just over 6 million units, for £33.4m.
Kinney displaces Ferguson, ending a run of two weeks at the summit for the former Manchester United boss. Still, My Autobiography's (Hodder) 73,572 unit sales were incredibly strong. Though it failed to hit the 100,000 mark for the third straight week, Fergie's memoir still chalked up the third best hardback non-fiction weekly sale of 2013, a healthy 37,000 units better than the next biggest weekly total, the 34,838 copies Jamie Oliver's Save with Jamie (Michael Joseph) sold in early September.
David Walliams also had a streak broken by Kinney, with Demon Dentist (HaperCollins) getting bumped to number two after six straight weeks as Children's number one. Yet, Walliams also saw his newest—The Slightly Annoying Elephant (HarperCollins)—hit the overall Top 50, at number 34 on sales of just under 6,400 units.
In the last year, Kinney and Walliams have owned the children's chart, combining to grab the number one spot an incredible 42 of 52 weeks.
Terry Pratchett's 40th Discworld novel, Raising Steam (Doubleday), is the second highest debut of the week, selling 36,088 units, good enough for third place. The 39th Discworld book, Snuff, sold just under 55,000 copies in its first week in October 2011.
In a strong week for Original Fiction, Ian Rankin's Saints of the Shadow Bible (Orion), James Patterson's Cross My Heart (Century) and Cecelia Ahern's How to Fall in Love (HarperCollins), also hit the Top 50. Patterson's Merry Christmas, Alex Cross (Arrow), was another Top 50 entrant in its first week of sales, and topped the Mass Market Fiction chart with 18,697 units sold.
Overall, just over £30.5m was sold through Nielsen BookScan last week, a slight edge (+0.6%) on the previous week, but 3% down on the same week in 2012.