Origin bursts into the charts with 100,000 copies sold

Dan Brown’s Origin (Bantam) has cracked the code to the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, selling 100,095 copies for £1m according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market.

Released last Tuesday (3rd October), Origin becomes the second title in 2017 to crack the six-figure mark in a single week, after David Walliams’ World Book Day title Blob (HarperCollins Children's) shifted 103,571 copies in the first week of March. While Origin’s first week out of the gate is half what its predecessor Inferno sold in 2013—which in itself was half that of The Lost Symbol in 2009—the title’s volume is the fastest-selling Original Fiction number one since Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (William Heinemann) in July 2015.

The Robert Langdon title is now a third of the way to toppling Shari Lapena’s The Couple Next Door (Corgi) as bestselling title of 2017 in volume terms. However, its £1m earned already places it in the top five most valuable fiction titles of the year—Transworld stablemate Paula Hawkins is the one to beat, with Into the Water (Doubleday) bringing in £1.47m since May.

After six weeks in the number one spot, Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients slipped to second place, though its sales actually went up by 14%, to 45,596 copies—the effect of Super Thursday (5th October) getting customers into bookshops?

The highest new entry released on Super Thursday itself—Brown jumped the gun by two days—was J K Rowling and Jim Kay’s illustrated Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury), which sold 18,890 copies and parked the (Knight) bus in the Children’s number one spot. Rowling has now surpassed £300m earned through BookScan’s TCM—the first author ever to do so. Jamie Oliver, her closest competitor, has barely brought in half (a still-staggering £166m to date).

James Patterson’s Cross the Line (Arrow) wiped the Mass Market Fiction number one from Joanna Trollope’s City of Friends (Pan)—J-Pattz’s second of the year, after Never Never crested the chart in March.

Instapoet Rupi Kaur scored her first Paperback Non-Fiction number one with The Sun and Her Flowers (Simon & Schuster) selling 7,121 copies. It is the first poetry book to take the category number one (and yes, it counts—Poetry Texts & Poetry Anthologies is defined as a non-fiction sub-category by Nielsen BookScan). Kaur’s debut Milk and Honey (Andrews McMeel), which is currently the bestselling book of the year in the US, also got a bump upwards, to 10th place.

Kazuo Ishiguro had a good week, following his Nobel Prize for Literature win—Never Let Me Go rose 1,000 places, to 266th place, and The Remains of the Day jumped from 3,718th place to 523rd.

A new Dan Brown and a glut of Super Thursday releases fused to create a sales firecracker—the market was up nearly 10% in value and 9.2% in volume week on week, with average selling price inching up to a new record of £9.56.