UK book trade bible The Bookseller has just released the first in its recently-announced new monthly e-book sales rankings, “the first ever [UK] e-book chart that includes publisher-supplied volume sales numbers,” for June e-book sales in the UK.
And topping the list is “Entwined with You,” the post-“Fifty Shades” erotic title by Sylvia Day from Penguin, which “sold more than 200,000 digital copies in June, ahead even of its print sales; meaning that it becomes the first title to top both monthly lists having sold more digitally than in print.”
The chart is available for free download, as per The Bookseller’s own recommendation, by emailing: ebookcharts@bookseller.co.uk.
As a sad comment on the state of UK literacy rather than libido, Dan Brown’s “Inferno” from Bantam Press was the second most popular title in the June ranking, though with less than one third the sales of Sylvia Day’s leader, at just over 60,000 e-copies. Third was Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” from Phoenix, at just under 50,000 e-copies.
There was more meat in the analytical breakdown from The Bookseller:
“Although the biggest digital book outsold the biggest selling print book in the month, the print Top 50 still accounts for greater sales than the digital Top 50,” it ran. “E-books took up 37% of the total units sales across both formats, ahead of the industry average of about 25%.”
Of course, Sylvia Day’s title could be responsible for causing an … ahem … bump in the figures, with its e-book sales far exceeding not only its own print sales of 167,348, but also the e-book sales of any other title in the ranking. This certainly tends to confirm the analysis of TeleRead’s Chris Meadows and others that more readers are turning to e-books for their erotica fixes because they can’t be outed as porn readers in public. After all, you’d otherwise expect paper copies of Day’s delight to be slinking off the shelves in equal numbers.
“The Bookseller estimates that the e-book market was worth £17.6m [$26.7 million] in June, 19% of the overall book market as measured by value,” The Bookseller’s coverage concluded. Once again, though, it’s worth emphasizing that this ranking is based on figures reported by a select panel of publishers only, and hence skewed to their clout—although The Bookseller does invite other publishers to submit their own sales data as well. Self-published titles are not on the menu. For those, you’ll just have to turn to (surprise surprise) Amazon.co.uk’s Top 100 Kindle Books.
