BESTSELLER OF THE YEAR
THE WINNER HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD J K ROWLING, JOHN TIFFANY AND JACK THORNE LITTLE, BROWN
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, released on J K Rowling’s (and the title character’s) birthday—31st July 2016—became the bestselling book of the year on publication, shifting 847,886 copies in its first week on sale. The eighth Harry Potter book became the fastest-selling title since the seventh Harry Potter book, released nine years before it; Rowling did a pretty good job of keeping her own records intact while destroying everyone else’s—especially that of E L James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, which previously held the record for the decade’s largest single-week volume. Cursed Child beat it by nearly 200,000 copies. Only the fifth, sixth and seventh Harry Potter titles have racked up bigger single-week volumes. Though The Cursed Child is filed in the Children’s Fiction category, it also broke all records for the Drama Texts, Plays and Screenplays category. Its first-week value of £8.7m was significantly larger than the category’s entire 2015 haul— and that was its best year on record.
The Cursed Child held the number one spot for six weeks in total, hitting the million-copy mark after just a fortnight on sale. By the end of 2016, the playscript had racked up 1.46 million copies sold, for £15.96m. The title was honoured with a Nielsen Book Specsavers Bestseller Platinum Award for titles that have racked up more than one million copies sold. Though we do not have sales figures; the script was also a bestselling e-book, published by Rowling’s own company Pottermore. The Bookseller’s Bestseller of the Year award was launched in 2017 to recognise the commercial success of the year’s big books and their wider impact on the book market. Both Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train and Joe Wicks’ Lean in 15 also surpassed the seven-figure mark in 2017, while David Walliams’ two narrative titles The Midnight Gang and The World’s Worst Children brought in sales of 628,000 and 476,000 respectively. Together these titles helped boost the market by 5%. Charmed, we were.
46. BRITISH BOOK AWARDS - WINNERS 2017
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