You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Lost Symbol global sales reach 1.9m in first week
The Lost Symbol has sold nearly a third of its 6.5m worldwide English language print run in its first week, according to figures from Nielsen BookScan.
Total English language sales, excluding Canada, have reached 1.9m since the latest Dan Brown novel was released on 15th September. The US hardback sales of The Lost Symbol have totalled 1.2m copies in the first week. Australian sales exceeded 127,000, while in New Zealand they hit almost 20,000. South Africa saw more than 8,500 copies go through the tills.
Sales in the UK and Ireland topped 573,000 copies - more than half the original 1m printed - in its first five days, leading the company to order an extra print run, taking the number of copies available to 1.25m.
Alison Barrow, director of media relations at Transworld, said: "We are very, very pleased with the sales so far. It's very difficult to forecast these things, but we are very happy, as is the feedback we are getting from our customers."
She added: "We’re predicting very bullish sales for the second week. With any book you would imagine a tempering of sales over time, but all the anecdotal evidence we have had is that people are planning to buy the book for Christmas presents, so we are very confident will be at the top of the lists for Christmas gifts.
"I am sure there will be strong competition [for the number one slot] between now and end of year, but we will be focusing on ensuring good coverage for [The Lost Symbol] and the rest of the books we have coming up between now and end of the year."
The English edition is not only selling well in territories where the language is spoken natively. This morning, The Bookseller revealed the English language edition had entered the German charts at number two, with Bantam printing an extra 400,000 copies - on top of the 800,000 already released - to meet demand.
Although Brown has now broken records for adult fiction sales, JK Rowling still stands as the fastest seller of all time, with the 2007 title Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows selling on the first day 2.7m in the UK and Ireland, and 573,000 in Australia, according to Nielsen.
