Amazon announced its Bestselling Books of 2014 package — including an overall top 20, combining print and kindle sales, along with separate top 100 lists for print books and ebooks. Remember, however, that these promoted lists are for new releases in 2014 only. To find the true “bestselling books of the year,” regardless of when published, you need to burrow into Amazon’s bestseller archives for print and ebooks: There it becomes clear that John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars was really their bestselling title of the year, claiming the No. 1 Kindle slot and No. 3 print book slot (after StrenghtsFinder 2.0 and […]
Bestseller Radar
Amazon Publishing Is Firm No. 2 At Kindle Store
Amazon Publishing vice president Jeff Belle reported in his September 2014 update letter that in the US, In the US, “Amazon Publishing now ranks as the #2 publisher on the Kindle platform, based on paid copies (this means royalty-generating copies, and includes books sold a la carte, or through programs such as Kindle Unlimited or the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library).” Presumably that means only Penguin Random House sells more ebooks through the Kindle store. (Note carefully this applies to ebooks only.) Kindle Unlimited likely plays a strong role in those counts. As we have shown through multiple analyses of the Kindle […]
NYT to Add 12 New Monthly Bestseller Lists and Feature Selected Niche Lists In Print
The New York Times will start offering a new set of focused, monthly bestseller lists as of the September 21 issue of the NYT Book Review, and will continue to roll out new lists into 2015, adding 12 new lists in all. More importantly, they will at least a couple of the new “niche lists” a week in the print edition. The press release says four, but the 9/21 package includes two of the new lists. The fine print explains, “This page features a rotating combination of weekly best sellers — Paperback Trade Fiction, Mass-Market Fiction, Paperback Nonfiction, Advice, How-To and […]
People, Etc.
Books-A-Million has hired James Phelps as vp of eCommerce, responsible for “executing the vision, branding, merchandising and marketing strategy for Booksamillion.com.” Phelps has worked for retailers including HSN, Kohl’s, and Brookstone. At Red Wheel/Weiser Books and Conari Press, Kim Ehart has been promoted to assistant editor, while Michael Alexander has been promoted to production editor. Our Deal reports show the first reports from agent Anna Ghosh under her independent agency Ghosh Literary in San Francisco, though she set up the agency last year. That leaves Russell Galen as the sole principal at Scovil Galen Ghosh. In first-week sales reports, CNN laments Congressman Paul Ryan‘s […]
Closing the Book On Kindle Unlimited Bestsellers
As we have demonstrated pretty definitively over the past two weeks, the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited subscription service has shown their hourly Kindle “best seller” list — and therefore the entire “sales rank” system — to be a fiction of merchandising rather than a ranking of titles by actual, paid individual unit sales. Not only are subscription “reads” counted towards the sales and best seller rank, but now that participants have seen the effect on their own sales, it’s clear that even subscription “checkouts” are counted. (So as soon as a KU member downloads a title, that counts towards […]
People, Etc.
Kerry Eltman has joined Fox Chapel Publishing as chief financial officer. Previously he was controller at The Jay Group, a logistics and supply chain company. John Aardema has joined Sourcebooks in the newly created position of art director in the entertainment & gift group. He spent the past nine years as a freelance art director. William LoTurco has joined Kuhn Projects as an associate agent. Previously, he was at Vigliano Associates and WME. The Romance Writers of America announced its Golden Heart and RITA Award winners at its annual conference in San Antonio, TX last Friday. As of Monday morning, […]