Jamie Oliver whisks his way to second bestselling author of 2000s

04.12.09 Victoria Gallagher writing in The Bookseller

The cooks have defeated the freemasons, as Jamie Oliver beats Dan Brown to second place in the ranking of biggest selling authors of the noughties.

Household name J K Rowling sits at the top of the chart, while the largely unknown Richard Parsons occupies ninth place. Despite huge sales of The Da Vinci Code and his other thrillers, Jamie Oliver outsold Brown by almost £15m. However, Brown accrued overall sales of £72m, taking on second place for the volume of books sold. Oliver managed to cook up a tasty £86.8m worth of sales.

Parsons is the most surprising name in the top 10, accounting for sales of £48.3m. He is the man many students can thank for their A grades, as he set up CGP Publications in 1995 and has since written hundreds of study guides.

J K Rowling unsurprisingly holds the top spot with sales worth a spellbinding £215.9 million, according to Nielsen BookScan. The Bloomsbury author's sales were greater than the TCM revenue of all but nine publishers including Faber, Scholastic and Egmont. Rowling's Potter series also occupies seven of the top 10 books of the noughties.

The top 100 authors of the decade were responsible for almost one in every six pounds spent on books in the 2000s. Only five authors featured in Richard & Judy's Book Club's and Summer Reads appear in the top 100: Alice Sebold, Martina Cole, Jodi Picoult, Khaled Hosseini and Cecelia Ahern.