Betting on Dan Brown’s Inferno

Dan Brown’s new novel Inferno has jumped into the UK book charts in its first week of being on sale. In one week 228,961 copies were sold, the next bestselling book was Martina Cole’s The Life which sold 23,821.

Along with the new release came a number of betting markets at Ladbrokes.

There are odds of 8/11 that Inferno will be the bestselling book of the year while there are odds of 1/1 that it will not be.

There are also odds of 16/1 that it will outsell the Da Vinci Code and odds of 33/1 that it will be the fastest selling book of all time. There are even odds of 1000/1 that Inferno will outsell the bible.

While the book is selling well, his last novel, The Lost Symbol, sold over 550,000 when it was first published. However, ebooks are not included in the figures released for Inferno and they are likely to make up for a much larger proportion than in the past.

Despite the good sales figures the book has not been well received by critics, Jake Kerridge in the Daily Telegraph wrote, “As a stylist Brown gets better and better: where once he was abysmal he is now just very poor.” Nonetheless, at the end of the day, it’s the sales figures that count.