Nigella Lawson drops out of the top 20 in the cookbook chart thanks to clean eating

July 11, 2016

Nigella Lawson has dropped out of top 20 in latest cookbook sales chart
‘Clean eating’ recipe books are ahead of Miss Lawson and Jamie Oliver
Cook has written about frustration with the ‘clean eating brigade’ in past

Tim Lamden Showbusiness Correspondent For The Daily Mail

Published:
16:50 EST, 10 July 2016

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Updated:
20:27 EST, 10 July 2016

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Her indulgent recipes and racy delivery made her into television’s most famous domestic goddess.

But now Nigella Lawson is seeing her popularity wane in the face of the ‘clean eating’ fad.

Miss Lawson, 56, has dropped out of the top 20 in the latest cookbook sales chart, according to industry magazine The Bookseller.

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Miss Lawson (pictured) has dropped out of the top 20 in the latest cookbook sales chart, according to industry magazine The Bookseller

Topping the list is the self-titled ‘Body Coach’ Joe Wicks with his Lean In 15 collection of recipes and workouts.

Cookery writers Ella Woodward and Alice Liveing, who both promote ‘clean eating’, are also sitting ahead of Miss Lawson and Jamie Oliver who is 16th in the chart.

One book trade expert told the Sunday People: ‘In the past two decades, Nigella was untouchable but her sales appear to have petered out a bit recently. Clean eating books are now sweeping the board.’

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Wicks has sold close to a million books in a matter of months and sales of £7.6million have made him Britain’s third biggest cookbook writer of the past two years behind Oliver and Bake Off’s Mary Berry.

Lean In 15 was the overall best-selling book for nine weeks at the beginning of the year and Wicks’ latest book, Lean In 15: the Shape Plan, has topped the sales charts for the past two weeks.

Oliver is still the country’s most successful cookbook author with sales of £12.3m from a million copies since 2014

However, his sales are down from the £18.1m they earned during the previous two years with over £1.5m books sold.

Topping the cookbook sales chart is self-titled ‘Body Coach’ Joe Wicks (pictured) with his Lean In 15 collection of recipes and workouts

Miss Lawson’s books have sold 210,528 copies – worth £2.6m – since 2014

But this compares to sales of £3.7m – 270,000 copies – over the previous two years.

Kiera O’Brien, data editor at The Bookseller, said the success of ‘clean eating’ authors was even more remarkable considering their relative low-profile in comparison to household names like Miss Lawson.

She said: ‘More established cooks have huge backlists contributing to their figures – Jamie has 30 titles in the chart, Mary Berry has 47- whereas the likes of Joe Wicks and Ella Woodward have only one or two titles out so far.’

Miss Lawson has written in the past about her frustration with the ‘clean eating brigade’.

In the foreword to Simply Nigella, she wrote: ‘You will never hear me talking about “healthy” food. I hate the term, but not as much I am disgusted by the contemporary mantra of “clean eating”.

‘The clean eating brigade seems an embodiment of all my fears. Food is not dirty, the pleasures of the flesh are essential to life. We cannot control life by controlling what we eat.’