Text book success

How Naomi Simmons has sold almost 90 million books worldwide, by Jack Malvern in The Times.

Ms Simmons, from Shenley in Hertfordshire, is the author of New Standard English, a series of text books for primary school children that has sold 105 million copies in China.

But unlike [Dan] Brown, who has earned £250 million from royalties for his novels, Ms Simmons took a fixed payment of £160,000.

Ms Simmons and her co-authors became a phenomenon in China after the Chinese ministry of education decreed in 2001 that English should be taught in schools. Her book — published by Macmillan English and FLTRP, the publishing house of Beijing University — has inspired a generation of Chinese schoolchildren to sing songs about how the British use knives and forks rather than chopsticks.