Monday, February 02, 2009

Now what is the top-selling New Zealand non-fiction book?

Earlier today I published my estimates of the three top-selling New Zealand fiction books.But how about non-fiction? Any suggestions? The Edmonds Cookery Book? The Road Code?


Gordon Dryden’s long-selling book, The Learning Revolution (co-authored by Jeannette Vos), may well claim the title. He confirms that at least 10.4 million copies have been sold since the first edition was published in New Zealand in 1993, including five updates since then.

By far the biggest sales have been in mainland China (simplified Chinese characters), with 261,000 copies of the first edition, and 10 million sold of a special new edition published there in December 1998 and sold over the following seven months.
Its other major sales have been in Sweden (45,000 copies), New Zealand (30,000), the United Kingdom (25,000), the United States (20,000), Mexico (10,000), Russia (10,000), Taiwan and Hong Kong (traditional Chinese characters: 10,000 each) and around 2,000 each in other translations, including Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary and Brazil (Portuguese).

Publishers/authors - Any advance on 10.4 million copies?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you take Edmonds and the gardening guide out of the argument, what about Jim Henderson's Gunner Inglorious? Quite a few years ago it had sold more than 100,000.

Anonymous said...

From 1979 to 1991 I compiled biggest ever best seller figures from publisher information and published them annually in the Book Publishers Assn's newsletter. Anyone with access to the back issues will be able to use them as a starting point for updating.

My recall is that the Yates Garden Guide had sold over 3 million at that time followed by Edmonds Cookbook at (I'm a bit unsure here) about 1.3 million.