The Bookseller.com

1st December 2008

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Book sales begin autumn fightback

09.09.08 Philip Jones

Book sales are back up and running, having bounced back last week after a poor summer for the book trade. According to Nielsen BookScan, Total Consumer Market sales were £31.3m in the week ending 6th September, up by more than 9% on the previous week and by almost 1% on the same week in 2007.

It is the first positive week year-on-year since the beginning of August, and only the fourth week of growth for the book trade out of the last 18. Last week, Waterstone's revealed a like-for-like sales dip over the summer, in what it called a "weaker book market".

Last week's sales uptick pushed sales so far in 2008 to beyond £1.05bn, still down by 0.8% on the same period in 2007, when the hardback release of Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows provided a unrepeatable boost to summer sales.

New entrants within the Top 50 suggest that publishers and retailers may now be beginning to reveal their Christmas hands, with Terry Pratchett's Nation (Doubleday) and Maeve Binchy's This Year it Will Be Different (Orion), in the top 10--both authors made the Christmas Top 50 chart last year with September-released books. Cliff Richard's My Life, My Way (Headline) is the other notable new entry: the book is the non-fiction hardback bestseller and came in at eleventh on the Top 50 chart with sales north of 14,500.

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