Figure 9

Weekly sales. The weekly sales numbers of all bestselling (A) fiction and (B) nonfiction books, thick lines showing the median sales values for that week. The shaded area starts after the first year and only 4% of fiction and 6% of nonfiction sales happen there. The number of books reaching their peak sales at a given week after publication, (C) for fiction and (D) for nonfiction. While the sales numbers vary significantly from book to book and from week to week, bestseller sales in both fiction and nonfiction increase sharply at first, reach their peak in the first ten weeks and drop slowly afterwards. The sale curves of selected outliers reaching their peak sales later than usual are shown in (E) for fiction and (F) for nonfiction