Reflected in You: New erotic novel beats Fifty Shades of Grey sales in first week

New erotic novel Reflected in You has sold more copies than Fifty Shades of Grey did in its first week.

Published by Penguin, it has shifted 82,759 paperbacks in the first six days of release in the UK according to Nielsen BookScan. 

Written by Japanese-American author Sylvia Day, Reflected in You is the latest in her Crossfire trilogy which includes Bared to You and Entwined with You, charting the emotional and romantic lives of Gideon Cross and Eva Tramwell.

Only JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol have sold more copies in their first week according to Nielsen.

Day’s book topped both the print and ebook charts in America following its release a month ago, selling 286,000 digital copies in the US in its first week of release.

With 75,000 digital pre-orders in the UK (full sales data not yet available) it has been called Penguin UK’s “most successful ever e-book in terms of weekly sales”.

It has emerged as serious competition to EL James’ Fifty Shades trilogy, the first book of which became the biggest-selling tome since records began with more than 5.3 million sales.

Like Fifty Shades, the Crossfire series follows a female protagonist through her relationship with a tormented billionaire. It contains sexually explicit description could also be described as “mummy porn”.

Although Fifty Shades debuted with relatively modest sales, at its peak it was selling over half a million copies a week. Typically the number 1 book in the UK sells between 20 and 30 thousand copies a week – though this is much higher for big name titles, and around the Christmas period - according to Nielsen.

Day’s previous book Bared to You has sold over 558,000 copies to date.