Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the fourth fastest-selling book of all time

The script book for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child blows past Fifty Shades of Grey to sell a ton of copies in its first week in bookstores.

Did Harry Potter and the Cursed Child sell well? Yes. Yes it did. Booksellers assumed that “the eighth Harry Potter story” would be a hit, but its sales exceeded even those expectations. It’s pretty much a lock for the best-selling book of the year. Now, Express reports that it’s among the fastest-selling books of all time, as well, at least in the U.K.

Cursed Child sold 847,886 copies in Great Britain within its first week of release starting July 31. Fifty Shades of Grey set the benchmark after its release in 2012, when it sold 664,478 copies over the same time period as Cursed Child, which has now well surpassed E.L. James’ success.

This development has obviously thrilled booksellers. “Our sales for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child script book have been phenomenal,” said Kate Skipper, buying director at Waterstones, a prolific British book retailer. “[W]e saw our biggest first day figures since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in 2007 and after just two days’ sales Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is already our biggest-selling hardback since Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol in 2009.”

By the end of this first week, we expect to exceed The Lost Symbol sales and to match the lifetime sales of our bestselling script book ever, An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley. There’s no doubt about it; this will be our biggest book of the year.

Deathly Hallows, by the way, is the fastest-selling book of all time. It sold 1.84 million copies in the first week. Cursed Child is in fourth place?

What’s in second and third place? If you guessed “more Harry Potter books,” you’d be right. In second place is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, having sold 1.47 million copies in its first week. Deathly Hallows sold 1.45 million copies, and so comes in third.

And there are more books on the way, including but not limited to the definitive edition of Cursed Child, which will come out in early 2017. The version currently available is the rehearsal edition, so we might see some changes with the upcoming one, but likely nothing extreme. Since both scripts will be so similar, the definitive edition probably won’t see such record-breaking sales numbers. Of course, this is still Harry Potter we’re talking about, so it’ll likely keep the good times rolling for Rowling and her publishers.