M ichael O'Mara Books: 'Continuing to punch well above its weight...'
The Bookseller, 2008
W INNER of the International Achievement of the Year Award at the Independent Publishers' Guild Awards 2008
S HORTLISTED for Independent Publisher of the Year Award at both the Independent Publishers' Guild Awards 2008 and the British Book Industry Awards 2008
F or over twenty years, Michael O'Mara Books has been creating highly commercial bestsellers in a range of non-fiction genres, from celebrity biographies to puzzle books, humour titles to nostalgic gift books. We've had a spectacular autumn, with successful titles from Roger Moore's Sunday Times bestselling autobiography, My Word Is My Bond to The ASBO Fairy Tales and the follow-up to the bestselling I Before E (Except After C), My Grammar and I, which sold over 100,000 copies.
N ow in its twenty-fourth year, Michael O'Mara Books has established a reputation for high-profile autobiographies and biographies (including My Word Is My Bond by Roger Moore, Anything Goes by John Barrowman, and Andrew Morton's Diana: Her True Story, the second highest-selling book of the 1990s, and still in print), innovative humour and non-fiction (such as the Sunday Times bestseller I Before E (Except After C), The Timewaster Letters and The Book of Senior Moments), as well as highly commercial children's books published under our Buster Books imprint (The Boys' Book, The Girls' Book and the Doodle series, including the bestselling Do You Doodle? and Beautiful Doodles).
O ur ability to react very quickly to market trends is something of which we are very proud. The Sudoku craze kick-started our range of puzzle books, which have now sold over a million copies, while the hugely successful I Before E (Except After C) series tapped into the nostalgia trend which is still going strong.
A mong the list's triumphs are John Barrowman's Anything Goes, which was in the Sunday Times bestseller list for twelve consecutive weeks in 2008 and My Word Is My Bond, which has now sold over 95,000 copies. The Mums' Book: How To Be Best At Everything and The Dads' Book, are also both Sunday Times bestsellers, reaching numbers one and two respectively. These books are part of the same 'Best of Everything' series as The Boys' Book of Survival and The Girls' Book of Glamour, published by our imprint Buster Books, which has now sold over 1 million copies in total. Cheryl Cole: Her Story - The Unauthorized Biography was the surprise hit of Christmas 2008, selling 65,000 copies since publication in November 2008.
Michael O'Mara's inventive and highly commercial list continues into Spring 2009 with the release of Anything Goes in paperback and the autobiography of Jodie Prenger, the winner of the BBC's top rating talent show I'd Do Anything. There are also some fantastic gift titles from the latest in the I Before E series, The Numbers Book and A Classical Education, both due to be published in June. This Spring will also see the publication of Letters From the Trenches, the letters of a First World War soldier, which were previously shown on a hugely popular blog.