Nadine Dorries' first novel, a "heartbreaking family saga set in 1950s Liverpool", has sold more than 100,000 copies, according to official sales figures.
The Bookseller said that the Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire's The Four Streets sold 106,528 ebooks in May, putting the novel at the top of its ebook ranking and well ahead of the second-placed ebook, Dani Atkins' romance Fractured, which sold 54,169 copies that month. Dorries also beat the ebook sales of The Accident by CL Taylor, which racked up 45,173 sales, said the Bookseller, and two books which have been chart-toppers for months: John Green's smash hit The Fault in Our Stars, which came in fourth, with 33,088 ebooks sold, and Jo Nesbo's The Son, trailing with 29,136.
"She's done us proud," said Anthony Cheetham at Head of Zeus. "She's got a real knack for telling a story." Despite receiving a scathing review in the Telegraph, which called The Four Streets "a halting story told in vacuous language" and gave it one star, readers have flocked to write the novel up positively online, with almost 1,000 reviews on Amazon, the vast majority of them four and five-star.
The Bookseller's editor Philip Jones pointed to "some smart pricing decisions" from Head of Zeus for the digital edition of The Four Streets. "It sold between 20p and 70p in May, and is still priced at 59p as of today, where it sits at eight in the Kindle top 10. It has a print list price of £10, but a digital list price that is much lower, and variable," said Jones. "Whatever your views on ebook pricing, for a debut book that is part of a trilogy from a writer controversially famous as a MP that is an undoubted success story. In using the Kindle platform to get the book out to a wide audience the publisher has both established the writer as a 'bestseller', and harvested plenty of reviews, too."
Print sales for the novel are much lower: the hardback has sold 2,735 copies to date in the UK and the paperback 637, said book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan.
"If you have got a completely new author who has not written a book before, even if you price the hardcover down to £10, it's still a risk – the reader feels they don't know the author," said Cheetham. "But if you see it's available for £1 as an ebook … then you're not taking any risk at all, so you try it out, if you like it you tell your friends – this is a way of getting an author seen that simply wasn't there before. I used to reckon, before ebooks, that it would take a writer five, six or seven books before they had enough of a name to get on the hardcover bestseller list. This means you can do it instantly."
Dorries, who controversially appeared as a contestant on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, has said that she manages to fit in writing with her job as an MP because "my youngest child left home for university and I was left with an empty nest. I replaced ironing, shopping, cleaning and chauffeuring, with writing."
"I claim no Parliamentary expenses and use my outside earnings from writing to subsidise my public role as an MP," Dorries has said. "I discovered writing very late and as a result I would encourage anyone, even people who claim not to be creative, to try and find a creative hobby. You never know where it may lead. For me, it led to a deep contentment and happiness that has helped me to fulfil so many other roles in my life and, without doubt, I am a better MP as a result of the enjoyment I derive from writing in my spare time."
The second book in her saga, Hide Her Name, is due out in December. Dorries describes the books as "a mishmash of the people, personalities and events which were the backcloth to my life when growing up in Liverpool".
