Dragon Tattoo hits 2m UK sales

13.07.11 | Philip Stone - The Bookseller

Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Quercus), the first book in the late Swedish journalist's Millennium thriller trilogy, has become only the sixth adult novel to sell more than two million copies since records began.

Helped by a deep-discount deal at Tesco, 10,870 copies of the book were snapped up at UK booksellers last week, taking its total sales across all print editions to 2,000,345. Since publication in January 2008, £10.9m has been spent on copies of the thriller, which sold just 14,100 copies in its original, hardcover format.
The book joins an elite group of just five other adult-audience novels to have sold more than two million copies: Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Vintage), and four novels by Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, The Lost Symbol and Deception Point—all published in the UK by Transworld).
Just shy of £29m has been spent on Larsson's entire trilogy since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hit the shelves, accounting for more than 60% of his UK publisher Quercus' total book sales, according to Nielsen BookScan data.
Former Harvill publisher Christopher MacLehose acquired world English-language rights to the Millennium trilogy in 2007 from Magdelena Hedlund at Stockholm's Norstedts Agency. At the time, he told The Bookseller: "I think Larsson is going to be very, very big. I know a large number of people who have just devoured these books".