Fifty Shades of Grey beats fastest one million sales record

LONDON, UK – EL James’s erotic fiction Fifty Shades of Grey has become the fastest adult paperback novel to sell one million print copies, smashing the previous record set by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

According to The Guardian, book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan said James’s book – the first in a trilogy – passed the million mark in just 11 weeks, and has now sold 1,162,637 copies. By contrast, The Da Vinci Code took 36 weeks to pass the million marker.

Nielsen Bookscan also said the book had broken the weekly record for paperback sales with 397,889 copies sold, beating JK Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which shifted 367,625 copies in 2008, the BBC reported.

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Fifty Shades of Grey is now the 32nd bestselling book since records started being kept 14 years ago, while sequels Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed sold 245,801 and 212,832 copies respectively last week.

According to The Daily Telegraph, online retailer Amazon said earlier this week that Fifty Shades of Grey had become the first ebook to sell one million copies for Kindle reading devices. James has said the books offer women a “holiday from their husbands.”

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