Based on “real Nielsen data” (e.g. print sales), the company has published a list of the top-selling authors since 2001 (along with their biggest-selling title): 1. James Patterson (1st to Die) 2. J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) 3. Nora Roberts (Red Lily) 4. Dr Seuss (Oh, the Places You’ll Go!) 5. John Grisham (A Painted House) 6. Stephenie Meyer (Twilight) 7. Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code) 8. Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook) 9. Janet Evanovich (One for the Money) 10. Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid) 11. Stephen King (Dreamcatcher) Little, Brown says Patterson has had […]
Bestseller Radar
Pastor Mark Driscoll Apologizes for Using Result Source to Manipulate Bestseller Lists
You may have already been following the story in which it was revealed earlier this month that Result Source was hired by the Mars Hill Church in Seattle to manipulate bestseller lists on behalf on their Pastor Mark Driscoll’s book REAL MARRIAGE (co-authored with his wife). At first, a church spokesman defended the move: “Mars Hill has made marketing investments for book releases and sermon series, along with album releases, events, and church plants, much like many other churches, authors, and publishers who want to reach a large audience. We will explore any opportunity that helps us to get that message […]
Amazon’s March Picks, and Kindle First Tops their List Again
Amazon’s March books of the month were posted over the weekend, with Phil Klay’s Redeployment as their Spotlight pick, and Nickolas Butler’s Shotgun Lovesons as the featured debut. Their selections include Atavist Books launch title, the digital-only novella by Karen Russell, Sleep Donation (it releases towards the end of the month, on March 25). The rest of the March picks: Boy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi Blood Will Out, Walter Kirn Savage Harvest, Carl Hoffman Bark: Stories, Lorrie Moore Sleep Donation, Karen Russell All Our Names, Dinaw Mengestu The Naked Future, Patrick Tucker The Cairo Affair, Olen Steinhauer The Enchanted, Rene Denfeld Speaking of Amazon, before you read another spate […]
Kindle Worlds, Kindle Words
Amazon announced more licenses for their Kindle Worlds fan fiction program, including GI Joe (from Hasbro); the TV shows Pretty Little Liars and Ravenswood (expanding their relationship with Warner’s Alloy Entertainment); and works from authors Markus Sakey and Theresa Ragan. The Seattle Times noticed an interesting restriction in Hasbro’s license. The Rhode-Island based company requires that “G.I. Joe’s comrade, Snake Eyes, cannot be a portrayed as a fan of the New York Yankees.” The paper takes a broader look at Amazon Publishing in connection with the announcement. The new non-specific statistic is Amazon Publishing head Jeff Belle saying that “the […]
The Truth About 2013’s Top 100 Books: Not A Single, Self-Published Title
In today’s fragmented world of incomplete sales data — largely because we do not have any public disclosure of ebook unit sales on a title-level basis — USA Today’s annual list of the top 100 bestsellers performs a more important function than ever. That’s because they are the only compiler of bestseller lists to issue an annual chart that combines both ebook and print sales data from most major sellers. More particularly, their dataset includes Kindle sales but puts them in the context of the overall market, so you can differentiate between the storyline Amazon popularizes about what’s selling in […]
Nielsen’s 2013 Bestsellers Topped By O’Reilly, Brown and Kinney
Nielsen Bookscan’s lists of the bestselling books for 2013 were published at the end of last week, the trade’s comprehensive account of print book sales across what the company estimates is at least 80 percent of the print market. (There is still no public tracking service for ebook sales.) But direct comparisons about changes in print sales for the year are hard, because Bookscan expanded its data pool for 2013 by adding Wal-Mart sales. So total sales tracked expanded as Wal-Mart added between 5 and 10 percent to the total data pool. For year-over-year comparisons, there is the Bookscan’s subsection […]