“Atlas: The Last Book in the Seven Sisters Series Breaks Sales Records in the Netherlands”

The last part in the popular Seven Sisters book series is flying over the counter. In one day, about 150,000 copies have been sold Atlas: the story of Pa Salt, estimates Xander Publishers, which publishes the book.

The Collective Propaganda of the Dutch Book Foundation (CPNB) will only be able to confirm these figures with certainty in the course of next week, but it does see that sales are indeed going exceptionally fast. “This is absolutely unprecedented,” says a spokesman for CPNB. “This is great. That so many readers are now grabbing the book. This is also fantastic for bookshops.”

The book series is about a group of sisters who go looking for their adoptive father after the death of their adoptive father roots. He has left a clue for each sister. Writer Lucinda Riley, who died unexpectedly two years ago, had promised her fans that with this last part she would clarify who the mysterious adoptive father Pa Salt is. Riley’s son Harry Whittaker finished the last book after her death.

The long-awaited eighth part of the book series has been printed in the Netherlands in an edition of 350,000 copies, something that hardly ever occurs here. Other books that have been printed in such large numbers have been the hugely popular Harry Potter and Dan Brown series.

“For us this is really unique”, Xander Uitgevers responds to the enormous circulation. “We expect that the stores will still have some stock, even after this weekend, but we have already started a reprint.” The circulation of this second edition will be 25,000 copies. “But we’re looking at this weekend, maybe we have to go up a bit.”

In the style of the Harry Potter books, bookshops here and there in the Netherlands organized special launch events at night for Atlas. This is also the case at the Veenerick bookstore in Roelofarendsveen. “There were no whole queues, as there were at the time with Harry Potter, but we did have about thirty enthusiastic ladies and one gentleman who we could make happy at night,” says bookseller Joris Koek van Veenerick.

“We drank a glass of champagne with some of them and talked until about 1 a.m. Some went straight home,” says Koek, who had bought about 350 books and sold more than half of them during the day . “It also coincides nicely, doesn’t it, with Mother’s Day this weekend? It’s like they’ve thought about that.”

Things are also going fast at the Utrecht bookstore Broese, says a spokesman. “We don’t see this often. We’ve sold about 200 copies since yesterday. There’s a whole tower of books in the store and one is taken every few minutes, actually.”

Xander Uitgevers has also noticed renewed interest in the earlier books due to all the attention paid to the last part of the series. “We see that they are going well again. Part one is after Atlas now the best-selling book again.”

Yesterday, author Lucinda Riley was awarded four Golden Books, the prizes for books that have been sold more than 200,000 times. The parts Parel, Maan, Zon in The Seventh Sister all four sold more than 200,000 times, with which all volumes have now been awarded a Golden Book. The first part even received a Diamond Book, which means that it was sold more than 500,000 times.