08.03.11
The latest crop of £1 World Book Day books, led by Cope & Davies’ Spy Dog/The Great Pet Shop Panic (Puffin/S&S) take positions one-through-six in this week’s Official UK Top 50, with sales totalling 247,235 copies—a significant proportion of which will have come via pupils’ £1 book token redemptions.
The combined sales figure is down 8% on last year’s £1 titles in the comparative week, and down 40% on the pre-flip-book days of 2008, although no doubt many tokens were once again redeemed against the price of “regular” children’s books—not least L J Smith’s latest Vampire Diaries instalment, Midnight, and the mass-market edition of John Grisham’s first YA novel, Theodore Boone (both Hodder), both of which sold more than 10,000 copies last week.
But as children went back to school following the half-term break, total spending on children’s books through Nielsen BookScan’s Top 5,000 bestseller chart fell by 12% week-on-week, and was down around 3-4% on World Book Day week last year.