New and/or Improved We have a few PublishersMarketplace updates for you: * Our genius webmaster has added a cool pop-up “bestseller history” feature to our very popular new bestseller section. So now the same way you can view a complete “tracker” sales history, you can also bring up and analyze a book’s complete bestseller list results, tapping our database back to last fall. So, for example, you can see that even as Gregory Maguire’s WICKED hits its highest ranking on the USA Today since its debut there last October at No. 34, the book ended its modest run on the […]
Lunch for Friday, July 2
Catching a Famous Goat The WSJ tracks down the “My Pet Goat” story that President Bush is shown reading to a group of schoolchildren on 9/11 in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” They report: “Because the story is part of a classroom anthology, finding a copy — except for one listed under MY PET GOAT on eBay yesterday — has been near impossible. The story is contained in a book called READING MASTERY: Rainbow Edition, Level 2, Storybook 1, a school reading aid offered by SRA/McGraw-Hill, an educational publisher owned by McGraw-Hill.” This Amazon link says that it contains PET GOAT […]
Lunch for Thursday, July 1
Anonymous No More The Boston Phoenix declares that the author of the forthcoming IMPERIAL HUBRIS is anonymous at the insistence of the CIA, and against his own wishes. They report that, “Nearly a dozen intelligence-community sources, however, say Anonymous is Michael Scheuer — and that his forced anonymity is both unprecedented and telling in the context of CIA history and modern politics.” The paper supports the story with a fax from the CIA’s publications review board that reads: “This letter is to confirm that it is the Agency, and not the author that insists that approval for the manuscript is […]
Lunch for Wednesday, June 30
Clinton Bookscan: Over 600K Nielsen Bookscan reports that they have tracked sales of approximately 606,000 copies of MY LIFE through last Saturday. The book was No. 1 in all 99 regional markets broken out within the tracking system. Given the percentage of the market that they cover, and the likelihood of big sales at nonreporting outlets such as Wal-Mart, Bookscan says they believe their tracked number is consistent with marketwide estimates provided by Knopf. Bremer’s Ready for Josephson Money Ambassador L. Paul Bremer 3rd is looking to make a quick transition to the private sector, having retained ICM’s Marvin Josephson […]
Lunch for Tuesday, June 29
MY LIFE Nears A Million, and More Books of the Moment Knopf estimated that MY LIFE had sold 935,000 copies through Sunday. Following the fashion of TBR, the Washington Post Book World has posted in advance their forthcoming Sunday review of MY LIFE by Walter Isaacson. As for other books on the landscape, I neglected to note yesterday that IMPERIAL HUBRIS was No. 2 at Amazon (now it’s No. 5). St. Martin’s is circulating a letter to booksellers from Patrick Buchanan with a warning of his own in advance of the pre-convention publication of WHERE THE RIGHT WENT WRONG. Buchanan […]
Lunch for Monday, June 28
Hubris Gets Heat In the midst of Clinton madness I missed the building buzz over the next inside the Beltway book aimed for headlines and bestseller lists: Brassey’s forthcoming IMPERIAL HUBRIS: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism, set for release on July 4. Promoted as by an “anonymous member of the U.S. intelligence community,” the NYT says the author is a “22-year veteran of the C.I.A. who is still serving in a senior counterterrorism post at the agency and headed the bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999.” He criticizes the Iraq invasion as “an avaricious, premeditated […]