Apple has named a short group of “best books” for the year, picking George Saunders‘ Tenth of December as their best work of fiction; Bill Bryson‘s One Summer as best nonfiction; Brandon Sanderson‘s The Rithmatist as best YA; and Breaking Bad as the best “made for iBooks” title. The iBookstore has more top 10 lists, across about 20 categories. In general fiction and literature, Apple’s top 10 is: Tenth of December, George Saunders The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt Someone, Alice McDermott Enon, Paul Harding Dissident Gardens, Jonathan Lethem How to Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, Mohsin Hamid All That Is, […]
Bestseller Radar
Amazon’s Many Bestseller Lists
As usual, Amazon has released a wealth of bestseller lists for the year. On their site they break out Top 100 lists of print books and ebooks for both adult titles as well as books for kids & teens. (The success of new adult and crossover YA makes that an increasingly hard distinction to draw.) Plus they announced top 20 lists that combine print and ebook sales. (Note that in all cases, Amazon counts only books newly-published in 2013 for these year-end lists.) Their top 20 adult books are: 1. Inferno by Dan Brown 2. And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini […]
People, Awards, Etc.: Munro, Charkin, Levinson, Potter Postage, and More
Vintage is reprinting a total of 100,000 copies across their backlist of 14 story collections by Nobel laureate Alice Munro. Random House Canada ceo Brad Martin told the Globe and Mail, “As far as we know, we have stock of all of Alice’s active titles,” though booksellers were light on copies and ran out quickly. Indigo placed “nice, substantial orders” for fresh inventory. You can read (or hear) Munro’s short phone call interview with the prize organizers here. She said in a written statement Thursday: “This is so surprising and wonderful. I am dazed by all the attention and affection that has […]
People and More
Greg Stadnyk has joined Little, Brown Children’s as associate art director. He was at Penguin Children’s. Iris Blasi has been named marketing director, senior editor at Pegasus Books, effective August 12. She was formerly marketing manager at Open Road Integrated Media. Longtime Amazon employee Sarah Jane Gunter, who has worked most recently in the company’s Luxembourg and Paris offices, will become publisher of the Amazon Crossing imprint on September 1. As the company explains in a job listing, they are starting a branch of Crossing in Germany (Amazon Crossing DE), “to establish new foreign authors in Germany.” The Book Industry […]
People, Etc.: NYT Changes Advice Lists
As of the April 28 lists, the New York Times is changing their Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous bestseller lists. The separate hardcover and paperback lists–each listing 10 positions, with another 5 “also selling” titles–are combined into a single list with 20 numbered positions. The new combined list also incorporates ebook sales along with print sales. (Up until now, the paper has noted “e-book sales for advice & how-to books, children’s books and graphic books will be tracked at a future date.”) The first iteration is dominated by food and diet books, but a new business bestseller–PL Spring/Summer Buzz Book […]
Bookselling: WSJ on ResultSource and Paid Bestsellers; UK Indies Decline
The old saw of authors “buying” their way onto bestseller lists through carefully timed bulk orders gets a fresh twist in Friday’s WSJ, which reports on the San Diego-based company ResultSource. The marketing firm, according to the paper, charges authors “thousands of dollars for its services” to buy copies of the authors’ own books–mostly as pre-orders–to boost opening week sales (and many of those copies are then returned). The service is particularly popular for business book authors, who can monetize the “bestseller” credit (even when it’s a single week on the list) for years at speaking engagements and other lucrative […]