Friday, November 04, 2011

Graeme Neill ,The Bookseller's news editor, with the week's highlights.

There have been several bright points this week however. Terry Pratchett's latest novel Snuff (Doubleday) became the fastest selling hardback adult novel by a British writer since records began. The authorised biography of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs sold 37,465 copies in its first week on sale. Only four other hardback biographies have sold more copies in its first week than the Little, Brown title. In the US, it became the 18th biggest-selling title of 2011 after only six days on sale.

We may finally get an idea of how much e-book sales are contributing to the book industry, with numbercrunchers Nielsen launching the first official sales charts for the US market. Published in the Wall Street Journal last weekend, it publishes a digital, hardback and combined chart for both fiction and non-fiction. It also shows how self-published authors can really make inroads digitally. Three self-published titles make the digital top 10 and Darcie Chan's The Mill River Recluse is number 10 in the combined print and digital fiction chart.

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