Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Man Booker Prize 2011: Sales for all the Booker Prize winners, including Julian Barnes

The Man Booker Prize 2011 has been won by Julian Barnes. Does winning guarantee a boost in sales? And which of the previous winners has sold most? With latest sales data for the 2011 longlist

Katy Stoddard - Our Daily Read

The Man Booker Prize 2011 was awarded to Julian Barnes on 18 October for his novel The Sense of an Ending.
All six shortlisted works have been experiencing the biggest bump in sales the Booker prize has seen.
The latest data from Nielsen Bookscan clearly demonstrates this Booker effect. In the week following the prize ceremony, Barnes' novel sold 14,534 copies, almost twice as many as AD Miller's Snowdrops (7,684), which has been this year's Booker success story so far. In the week before the win (to 15 October), The Sense of an Ending sold only 2,535 copies.
The shortlisted books have all benefited from their Booker approval. Weekly sales of all five runners up increased considerably in the days following Barnes' win, while sales of the other seven longlisted novels tailed off.
AD Miller's Snowdrops is still ahead, selling 51,944 copies overall (worth £340,958.38) to 22 October and outselling all other longlisted books, including The Sense of an Ending (though that and Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child have raised more revenue).
Will winning the Booker Prize guarantee Barnes a long-term boom in sales? We've pulled together the latest sales figures of all 44 winners of the title since its inception in 1969 (the prize was a tie in 1974 and again in 1992).
Nielsen's data runs from 1998 onwards, so sales of older books aren't directly comparable, but the runaway winner of recent years is Life of Pi by Yann Martel, which won in 2002 and has taken over £9.5m and sold 1.3m copies so far. That's almost twice as much as Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, in second place with sales of £5m (587,851 units). Sales of this year's shortlist pale by comparison.
And if you really have your heart set on a Booker, the words to include in the title of your novel are Sea, Ha, God, Tiger, Late, Life and Road, as our Wordle shows.
Check out the spreadsheet for sales figures of all the previous winners, as well as links to the Guardian's book pages, reviews and data on the 2010 and 2011 shortlists. Let's see what you can do.

1 comment:

Mark Hubbard said...

Well, I purchased the Kindle version of The Julian Barnes, simply because it won. Indeed, I'd normally buy the Booker winner each year (not the short-list though, even if I try to read some of the titles that look interesting).

The Kindle Barnes is quite unusual in that is loads with a much smaller font than everything else I have loaded, which I didn't think possible: very readable, though. However, it also just has a generic cover of an open book, which I think is a bit cheap. I suspect Kindle and ebooks will be the death of the book cover.