Brown and Green colour bestseller charts

11.06.14 | John Lewis - The Bookseller

Now totalling five weeks at number one in the Official UK Top 50, Dan Brown has scored the most weeks for any author at number one so far in 2014. With sales of 18,608 copies, Inferno (Corgi) was down 17% week on week but still comfortably ahead of the competition in second place. With sales of 164,936 copies, Inferno is now the third bestselling fiction paperback of 2014.

The top-selling paperback of the year so far however is this week's number two, John Green's The Fault in our Stars (Penguin).. Recently overtaking Kate Atkinson's Life After Life (Black Swan) at the top of the overall fiction paperback chart for the year, the novel has sold 253,400 copies (excluding the tie-in edition) in 23 weeks and contributed £1.3m to the TCM.

Bolstered by the film adaptation's pre-release hype, the book has gradually risen from the top seven a month ago to number two-the highest position Green has held on the UK Top 50. The standalone non-film tie-in edition also scored another milestone this week as it crossed the 500,000 copy threshold in the UK-one of just 81 fiction paperbacks to do so since 2001. Incidentally, Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (Vintage) needs to sell just 1,272 copies to join the two editions of the author's early noughties bestseller Atonement (Vintage), which have also crossed the 500,000+ barrier.

There were four new entries inside the top 10, including two hardback fiction titles-the first time both the genre and the format have been inside the 10 together this year. Peter James' Want You Dead (Macmillan) debuts at 10 (and number two on the Original Fiction chart) with 11,073 copies sold. This is James' 10th novel to feature detective Roy Grace. The author's previous hardback, Dead Man's Time (Macmillan) also debuted at 10 in the same week last year (w/e 8th June) but first week chart sales are 15% higher this year. At nine, Stephen King's latest thriller, Mr. Mercedes (Hodder) shifted 11,274 copies and is the bestselling original fiction title this week. Sales are down 47% on the author's previous bestseller, Doctor Sleep's chart debut week back in September 2013, (21,343 copies) but anticipation for that novel was substantially higher given its status as the sequel to one of King's most iconic works, The Shining. In August The Bookseller will be able to tally Mercedes' first month sales alongside it's debut month digital sales.

Elsewhere in Original Fiction, as James Patterson and Maxine Paetro's Unlucky 13 (Century) falls out of the top 20, the sequel to another Patterson series (written with Marshall Karp) NYPD Red debuts at three. First week chart sales are up 6% for the sequel in comparison to the original, which sold 3,587 copies at the end of October, 2012. It went on to sell 27,779 copies in hardback and has sold 140,574 copies across two physical  formats.

On the Mass Market Fiction chart, Donna Tartt's Pulitzer prize winning The Goldfinch (Abacus) has arrived in paperback and enters at three selling 12,377 copies. The novel has already sold 102,939 in hardback.