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George W Bush beaten by a Wimpy Kid in US
George W Bush's memoir, Decision Points (Crown), sold 437,000 copies across its print editions in its first five days on sale in the US, according to Nielsen BookScan. But the hardback edition has to settle for second position in the US bestseller lists behind Jeff Kinney. His fifth Diary of a Wimpy Kid novel, The Ugly Truth (Amulet) sold a massive 548,000 copies in its opening week in bookshops.
Nonetheless, Bush comfortably tops the BookScan list of the bestselling non-fiction titles of the week, outselling his nearest competitor, Fox News' Glenn Beck's Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth and Treasure (Threshold) by approximately 11 copies to one.
The audiobook edition of Decision Points, narrated by Bush himself, also sold 18,000 copies, according to BookScan.
In just five days, the hardback edition of the book has already become the fifth bestselling adult non-fiction book of the year, sitting one place behind comedian Chelsea Handler's book of light-hearted essays, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang (Grand Central) and one ahead of Michael Lewis' The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (Norton).
Although its sales are much higher than the first-week sales of his wife Laura's Spoken from the Heart (Scribner), which sold just shy of 150,000 copies in its opening week in May this year, it didn't quite match the performance of Sarah Palin's memoirs, Going Rogue (Harper), which sold almost 470,000 copies in its opening week last year.
It was also some way off the 606,000 first-week sale of Bill Clinton's memoir, My Life (Knopf), back in the summer of 2004.
In the UK, the former US president sold 4,300 copies of his memoir across all editions, a fifth of the first week sales Clinton notched up for his autobiography.
