Wimpy Kid pushes Alex Ferguson down

Alex Ferguson’s record-breaking memoir has had its tenure at the top of the bestseller list ended by the latest entry in Jeff Kinney’s ever popular Wimpy Kid series. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck – Kinney’s eighth book in the series since 2007, having published at the rate of one a year since its inception with an additional title in 2009 – recorded first week sales of 82,999. As noted by The Bookseller, that’s over 10% of its initial print run of 800,000.

Not only does that make it the fastest selling kid’s book of the year to date, it’s also the fastest selling kid’s book since… well, since the last Wimpy Kid book, The Third Wheel, released around this time last year and shifting more than 91,000 copies in its first frame. The series has now sold a cumulative total of over 6 million copies in the UK alone. Expect a similar news story this time next year.

Though Ferguson’s My Autobiography lost pole position, and fell under the 100,000+ per week standard it had set for itself until now, it still held up phenomenally well in its third week on release, selling 73,572 copies – more than good enough for second place, and more than double that of the biggest week of its nearest 2013 hardback non-fiction rival, Jamie Oliver’s Save With Jamie (Morrissey’s Autobiography moved slightly more than Oliver’s book in its first week last month, but of course went straight to a Penguin Classics paperback).

Third place was taken by another debuting title from a perennially bestselling series, Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld novel, Raising Steam, the first in the series since 2011’s Snuff. It sold just over 36,000 copies, but is perhaps more notable for being a landmark in the series that will make, say, writers of blog posts about book sales figures whose youthful interest in the Discworld series peaked around novels 16-20 feel incredibly old: Raising Steam is Pratchett’s 40th Discworld novel and marks the series’ 30th year.

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