Dan Brown's crypto-thriller The Lost Symbol has smashed first day sales records, its publisher has announced, selling "well over" one million copies in the US, UK and Canada in its first 24 hours in the shops.
The novel, Brown's first since The Da Vinci Code, has been flying off the shelves since it was published at one minute past midnight on Tuesday. Its US publisher, Knopf Doubleday, said yesterday that it had set a one-day adult fiction sales record for global English language sales (the record was previously held by Thomas Harris for Hannibal). The publisher described demand for the book as "unprecedented"
"We are seeing historic, record-breaking sales across all types of our accounts in North America," said Knopf chairman and editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta. Knopf said that demand for the book meant it would be printing an extra 600,000 copies of the book on top of its initial North American print run of 5m copies, while in the UK, Transworld is also going back to the printers, having initially printed one million copies of the novel.
Brown's first day sales of one million copies are nonetheless dwarfed by the final Harry Potter title, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which sold 2,652,656 copies in its first 24 hours in the UK alone, according to NielsenBookScan. Children's authors tend to garner higher first day sales: last summer the final novel in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, sold 1.3m copies on release in the US.
Waterstone's said that The Lost Symbol, starring symbologist Robert Langdon, had broken sales records across the chain, becoming its fastest selling hardback adult novel of all time. Readers were also keen to snap up the ebook version of the title: Waterstone's said the digital edition was its fastest selling ebook ever. "We averaged over one download of the new Dan Brown novel every minute from release," said commercial director Neil Jewsbury. "This proves that the ebook market wants to be able to buy major new titles as soon as they are released. If a publisher can make this happen for a title so anticipated and shrouded in secrecy as The Lost Symbol, then the day that every new title is available for download on the day of release is not far away."
An unabridged audio download of The Lost Symbol - which runs to over 17 hours - also became the book chain's fastest selling audio download ever. "Readers today are not governed by the restrictions of format. They want to be able to read a book in its traditional form, or on a Reader from Sony, or listen to it on their MP3 player," said Jewsbury.
He predicted that The Lost Symbol would remain at the top of the book charts for weeks to come. "There are a lot of great books out this Christmas, but we believe The Lost Symbol will remain at number one for some time – in many formats," he said.
