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The new James Bond continuation novel "Devil
May Care" has broken Penguin's records for the
fastest selling hardback ever...
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Devil May Care Breaks Records
4th June 2008
After just 4 days of sales, Devil
May Care,
the new James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks, has sold 44,093
copies making it Penguin's
fastest
selling hardback fiction title ever. Previous Penguin bestsellers
by the likes of Tom Clancy and Nick Hornby have sold about
11,500 copies in their first four days, the publisher said.
The novel enters the charts
this week at no. 1 in all relevant categories. Waterstone's
saw the highest sales selling over 19,000 copies. The
Waterstone's special edition of Devil May Care, retailing at £100,
had sold
out by midday on the 28th May - the day it went on sale. Their
flagship
store on Piccadilly in London saw queues to buy the book from
4.30pm the
previous day.
Above: Cover model Tuuli Shipster
and author Sebastian Faulks at the launch event
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Rodney Troubridge, Fiction Marketing Planner
at Waterstone's said, "In terms of the publicity and our
terrific sales this has been our fiction launch of the year and
it's unlikely to be superseded."
A special limited edition of Devil May Care,
designed by Bentley Motors, sold out in under 2 hours in the
UK. Three hundred of the luxury edition were produced, and retailed
at £750.
Joel Rickett, the deputy director of The
Bookseller magazine, said he was not surprised by the success
of Faulks's novel. "Penguin did a great job in turning
the release of this book into a major event," he said. "They
managed to raise a lot of awareness about the book and
create an excitement around it its release. I haven't witness
such a buzz since the publication of the Harry Potter books."
Penguin, who own the rights to Ian Fleming's Bond catalogue,
but not to the author's literary estate, have also had
considerable success with newly designed paperback editions
of the original Bond novels. "We are absolutely delighted
with the figures so far," said Joanna Prior, Penguin's
director of marketing and publicity.
Asked by The
Guardian whether Penguin had been in talks with 4th
Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins, to capitalise on
the success and continue with new Bond/Fleming books,
Prior confirmed that there were no plans as yet. "At
present, we're all just concentrating on the current
success, and on the plans for publishing the paperback
next year. "Sebastian Faulks made it clear that
this would be a one-off project, and our current agreement
with 4th Estate was for this project only." But
neither 4th Estate nor Penguin have written off the idea
of continuing the series, possibly with different literary
authors standing in as Fleming.
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The hardcover print run in Britain and the United
States is reported to be 400,000 copies. Devil May Care was published
on
Wednesday 28th May, the centenary
of the birth of Ian Fleming, and went on sale
that day for the first time at Waterstone’s
Piccadilly (which opened at the earlier time of
8am). More launch events took place at Borders
on Saturday 31st May.
