Walliams still leads charts, as Flanagan gets Booker bounce

Published October 21, 2014. By Tom Tivnan - The Bookseller

David Walliams notched up his fourth consecutive week atop the Official UK Top 50, while the Man Booker Prize proved a massive boost for Richard Flanagan. 

Walliam's Awful Auntie (HarperCollins) shifted 37,903 print units through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market, and with four straight number ones, Walliams has recorded the longest streak atop the charts this year by a British-born author. Since it was published on 27th September the book has sold just over 181,000 units through the TCM, making it the best selling children's fiction title of the year in just four weeks of sale. 

In his Booker winner's speech last week, Flanagan thanked the judges for the £50,000 prize cheque, revealing he had been so hard up for money after finishing The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto) that he had contemplated working in a mine. However, Flanagan may not have to rely solely on the prize money. The Narrow Road… shifted 10,242 print units last week, a massive 3,141% week on week sales hike, good enough for 11th place on the overall chart—and second in Original Fiction—the first time Flanagan has ever hit the Top 50. The £137,430 Flanagan earned last week with his Booker winner eclipsed his combined BookScan sales for the previous 10 years.
Despite Flanagan's Booker surge, he was unable to displace Martina Cole's The Good Life (Headline) from the top of Original Fiction. The Good Life retained its pole position for the second straight week by shifting 11,484 units. Similarly in Hardback Fiction, Roy Keane and Roddy Doyle's The Second Half (Weidenfeld) also retained its number one for the second consecutive week, selling 19,956 copies. 

Both Keane's memoir and Cole's novel had week on week sales declines (-5% and 12%, respectively), yet this was largely in line with the market as a whole. Overall, revenues were £27.8m, a 7.3% dip from the previous Super Thursday-boosted week, which at £30.97m, was 2014's biggest seven-day total through the TCM. Last week was a marginal drop (-1%) on the same week in 2013.  

James Patterson's 21st Alex Cross novel, Cross My Heart (Arrow), knocked Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (Phoenix) off the top spot in Mass Market Fiction after three straight weeks, selling 20,644 units—although combined sales of Gone Girl's original and tie-in editions totalled just over 30,000 units. This was Patterson’s fifth week atop Mass Market Fiction in 2014 with three different titles.