Walliams hits £100m earned through BookScan

David Walliams has surpassed the £100m mark through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market, a week ahead of The Beast of Buckingham Palace (HarperCollins) hitting the charts. The comedian-turned-author joins fellow Children's authors J K Rowling, Julia Donaldson and Jacqueline Wilson in the £100m club. Jamie Oliver, James Patterson and Dan Brown have also hit the nine-figure milestone, though Walliams is of only two authors (along with Brown) whose career began after the Nielsen BookScan era started in 1998.

Walliams' first book, released in 2008 and illustrated by Quentin Blake, was The Boy in the Dress. Its original hardback edition sold 18,482 copies the year of its release and the paperback, published the June after, sold 19,204 units in 2009. It has since gone on to sell 945,579 units in total, to become Walliams' fourth-bestselling title through BookScan.

His bestseller is Gangsta Granny, the publication of which marked the moment Walliams went from a very successful kid's author into a phenomenon. The paperback of Gangsta Granny spent 21 consecutive weeks as the Children's number one, from March to August 2013. Every Walliams release since has immediately gone to the overall number one in hardback. Gangsta Granny, illustrated by Tony Ross, has gone on to sell 1.35 million copies in paperback alone.

Walliams has also racked up two Christmas number ones with 2016's The Midnight Gang and 2017's Bad Dad, with The Beast of Buckingham Palace poised for a third. Three of Walliams' titles have managed to sell over 100,000 copies in a single week, with 2018's The Ice Monster, 2017 World Book Day title Blob and Bad Dad all shifting over six figures in their first or second week on sale. The Beast..., released three weeks' closer to Christmas than The Ice Monster or Bad Dad is likely to become the fourth, and will probably set a first-week personal best for the author.

With the publication of Fing in February and The World's Worst Teachers in June, the two bestselling Children's books of the year are already Walliams titles, with Bad Dad in sixth and The Midnight Gang in 10th place. For 2019 to date, the author has earned over £13m already, a 9% rise against the same period in 2018. However, if The Beast of Buckingham Palace comes anywhere near to matching the £4.3m The Ice Monster brought in last year, plus the inevitable boost for his backlist, Walliams' yearly value could surpass £18m for the first time.