Palin's Going Rogue hits top spot in US

26.11.09 Philip Stone in The Bookseller

Sarah Palin's much-anticipated memoir, Going Rogue (Harper), sold 469,400 copies in just six days upon its release in the United States—sending it comfortably to the top of the US bestseller lists.

It outsold runner-up James Patterson's I, Alex Cross (Little, Brown) by more than three copies to one, and on its 469,400 sale alone enters the US year-to-date non-fiction charts in eighth position overall, just ahead of film-maker Stephen Kendrick's Christian marriage guidance tome, The Love Dare (B&H—410,483 copies sold this year) and just behind the late Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture (Hyperion).

Although Going Rogue's sale is dwarfed by the 1.16 million-in-six-days figure posted by Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (Doubleday) this year, it is significantly greater than the first week sales of the other big political memoir release of 2009, the late Edward Kennedy's True Compass (Little, Brown), which sold 169,000 copies.

According to Nielsen BookScan US data, Bill Clinton's memoir, My Life (Knopf), sold just over 600,000 copies in six days upon its release in June 2004, while his wife Hillary's Living History sold 200,000 copies in its first 24-hours on sale in 2003, according to the Guardian.

HarperCollins US will be releasing Going Rogue in the UK on 10th December, sold through PGUK, available to order from TBS. Turnaround will be distributing the spoof Going Rouge, by Richard Kim, from the same day.

(Harper Collins released Going Rogue in New Zealand yesterday).

The US Top 10

1. Sarah Palin's Going Rogue (Harper) 469,358 (including pre-orders)
2. James Patterson's I, Alex Cross (Little, Brown) 138,887
3. Stephen King's Under the Dome (Scribner) 66,210
4. Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (Doubleday) 58,421
5. Jeff Kinney's The Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days (Abrams) 57,760
6. John Grisham's Ford County (Doubleday) 44,883
7. Andre Agassi's Open (Knopf) 44,315
8. Stephenie Meyer's Eclipse (Little, Brown) 41,203
9. Mitch Albolm's Have a Little Faith (Hyperion) 38,331
10. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight (Megan Tingley) 35,443