Abrams updated sales information on sales of Jeff Kinney’s new DIARY OF A WIMPY KID book, published four weeks, now with 6.5 million copies in print after three reprints. CEO Michael Jacobs says they have tracked nearly 2 million copies sold through the trade in the first four weeks, which “has exceeded all of our expectations in all markets.” Abrams also sells a considerable quantity of books in the school market through Scholastic’s book clubs and fairs (roughly equivalent to the trade market) but that sell-through is harder to track precisely in real-time. Those trade sales are up 35 percent […]
Bestseller Radar
Amazon Provides Authors with Limited Nielsen BookScan Data
As of today Amazon is letting authors enrolled in their “Author Central” program (e.g. FiledBy for Amazon) access a small window of Nielsen BookScan sales data for their own books. Needless to say, the offer is a major inducement for authors not already enrolled to sign up for the Author Central. The program shows the most recent four weeks of sales as tracked by Nielsen, on a week-by-week basis. It also provides geographical breakdowns, showing the same limited data set according to local DMA markets. They provide a nice visual national mapping of the data that Nielsen itself provides to […]
Press Drives Sales Burst for Dying Banker’s Self-Published Investment Guide
A Friday NYT piece covered a short self-published investment book from retired banker Gordon Murray, who is dying from glioblastoma. Murray wrote THE INVESTMENT ADVISER in a matter of months this summer with friend and financial adviser Daniel Goldie after being told he had just six more months to live. They self-published the book in August, and are distributing through Baker & Taylor. At first they gave the book away as a free PDF. The Times wrote: “It is plenty useful for anyone who isn’t already investing in a collection of index or similar funds and dutifully rebalancing every so […]
New York Times Promises eBook Bestseller Lists for “Early Next Year”
The paper announces to itself it will “publish e-book best-seller lists in fiction and nonfiction beginning early next year.” From the way it reads, they will run dedicated ebook bestseller lists rather than incorporate ebook sales into any of the existing lists. Royalty Share will work with the newspaper, to both “provide data and offer an additional source of independent corroboration.” They do not indicate specific data sources they will draw from, so it’s not clear if they will cover the major accounts that dominate current ebook sales. Amusingly, they promise to compile data from independent booksellers along with publishers, […]
100 Years Later, A Twain Bestseller
The first volume of Mark Twain’s posthumous autobiography from the University of California Press jumped to the top of bestseller lists at Amazon (currently No. 2) and Barnes & Noble (No. 3) yesterday. It has an official publication date of November 15, but the book (and ebook) was unveiled at a Mark Twain festival in Calavaras County, CA last Friday and is available now. Weekend publicity included a feature in the Philadelphia Inquirer and a segment on CBS Sunday Morning.Calavaras County coverage
Debut Novel Breaks Out in Canada, with Help from Costco
Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s debut novel SECRET DAUGHTER has had only modest sales in the US since its release in March despite being an Indie Next selection, but in Canada the book hit No. 1 on the Globe and Mail bestseller list in late spring and it continues to top lists there. The Globe and Mail says the book has “sales of about 6,000 copies a week and still climbing,” calling “its surprise success the juiciest mystery in Canadian publishing.” By their account, the trigger was the book’s selection by an “anonymous buyer” at Costco’s Ottawa office. Harper Canada vp of […]