Fifty Shades of Gray is Britain’s best-selling book to date, at least according to the publishers, but how does it compare?
Cornerstone Publishing (part of Random House) announced this week that the erotic novel has sold more than 5.3 million copies in print and electronically, more than Dan Brown’s Highway Code or The Da Vinci Code.
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The book has remained at the top of the UK bestseller lists for the 16th consecutive week. The second and third books, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, are also selling fast, with UK sales of 3.6 million and 3.2 million respectively. Combined UK sales of the trilogy exceed 12 million copies, with the book rights sold worldwide and published in languages including Albanian, Chinese, Russian, Serbian and Vietnamese.
but is it correct? testing sales across all platforms independently is very difficult as there are so many outlets. Nielsen Bookscan, which collects retail sales information from point-of-sale systems at more than 31,500 bookstores around the world, does not provide collected sales for e-books and physical books, which means we rely on publishers.
With this in mind, Nielsen has provided us with their list of the 100 best-selling books of all time in the UK. shows the volumes of each book, its publisher and genre. So how does Fifty Shades compare?
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isn’t at the top of this list: it has dan brown’s da vinci code at number one, followed by the harry potter novels.
The first thing to say is that the highway code rules it all, but because it has been around for so long it artificially jumps to the top of the list with the many versions since 1998 selling over 4.8 million of copies. so we’ve removed it from this list even though it’s easy to compare.
But considering that the Fifty Shades books just came out, they’re already a powerful force. Fifty Shades itself has sold 3,758,936 copies, with the two follow-ups, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed selling over two million copies each. Here’s how the great series compare:
The list is fascinating in its own right, even without the mastery of the great writers. Just because of these other featured books: • Featured Children’s Book: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, with 1,783,535 sales. julia donaldson’s the gruffalo is right behind with 1,781,269 sales• best cookbook: jamie’s 30 minute meals by jamie oliver with 1,743,266 sales• best non-fiction humor: the world according to clarkson by jeremy clarkson with 1,489,403 sales
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