Bridget Jones: first-day sales 'topped 46,000'

First day sales in the UK for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding topped 46,000 copies across all formats, according to publisher Jonathan Cape.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is an £18.99 hardback, and also available as an e-book and a Random House audiobook read by Samantha Bond.

The publisher noted that total first-day sales on publication date (10th October) represented 20% of the figure for total hardback sales for the previous title Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason in its first year of publication (228,115 copies).
 
Vintage sales director Tom Drake-Lee said: “In all my time in publishing I have never experienced such a palpable sense of excitement and anticipation from colleagues, booksellers and friends and family as I have with the return of Bridget Jones in Mad About The Boy. It has been phenomenal, as are the sales we have seen to date. This is only the beginning."
 
The sales come despite some largely unfavourable early reviews and a printer's error that saw pages of David Jason's autobiography bound into some early copies of the Fielding novel.

Nielsen BookScan's first sales data for the book, for the three days to end Saturday 12th October, will be published tomorrow (Tuesday 15th).