‘Grey’, ‘Go Set a Watchman’ top UK, US charts

11 January 2016 Books+Publishing

E L James’ Grey (Arrow) and Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (HarperCollins) were the bestselling books in the UK and US respectively in 2015. In the UK, the Bookseller reports that Grey sold 1.07m copies in 2015 at an average selling price of just £4.40 (A$9.20), noting that ‘discounting is still very much part of the bookselling puzzle’. The average selling price across all titles was £7.95 (A$16.62)—the highest since Nielsen BookScan records began in 1998. Also in the UK’s top five bestsellers for 2015 were Grandpa’s Great Escape (David Walliams, HarperCollins), The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins, Transworld), Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom (Batsford) and Mog’s Christmas Calamity (Judith Kerr, HarperCollins). Overall, book sales reached £1.5bn (A$2.41bn) with sales of over 190m for the first time since 2012. In the US, Publishers Weekly reports that Go Set a Watchman sold 1.6m copies, ahead of other bestsellers Old School (Jeff Kinney, Puffin), The Girl on the Train (Transworld), The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Marie Kondo, Ebury) and All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr, Scribner).

Category: International news