Will Murphy has joined the ghostwriting and publishing services firm Kevin Anderson & Associates as senior executive editor-at-large. He was previously executive editor at Random House. Kim Daly has been promoted to copy chief at Workman Publishing. Awards Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld‘s The Discomfort of Evening (Graywolf) won the International Booker Prize. At 29, they are the youngest author to ever win the prize. They will split the £50,000 prize with translator Michele Hutchison. Bookselling The Barnes & Noble store in Roxbury, NJ closed yesterday after 26 years, as part of a redevelopment of the mall where they were housed. […]
Bestseller Radar
Briefs
Controversies After UK thriller writer Mark Dawson admitted — or boasted? — about buying his way onto the Sunday Times bestseller list with a modest purchase of 400 hardcovers, Nielsen Bookscan has recalculated that Top 10 chart to remove Dawson’s book and the paper will issue a correction. Nielsen says they initially believed the purchase was related to a virtual book signing. Dawson, who still promotes his “top 10” listing on his Twitter page, said in a Twitter thread he was only cheating a little, not a lot: “If I was intent on ‘gaming the system’ I would have bought […]
Bookselling: Easter Book Sales Fall Short; More on the Prospects for Independent Booksellers
NPD Bookscan reported print book sales for the week ending April 11 of 12.47 million units. While that is nicely higher than the previous week, the proper comparison is to the week just before Easter a year ago, since book sales always spike measurably right before the holiday. The comparable week a year ago — ending April 20 — saw sales of 13.97 million units, making this year’s holiday week down over 10.7 percent in comparison. Per the trend during the pandemic, juvenile books continue to account for most of the week-over-week gains, registering sales of 6.385 million units (compared […]
Briefs
At Canongate, Andrea Joyce has stepped down as rights director after 13 years with the company. Jessica Neale succeeds her as rights and contracts director. Forthcoming Penguin Random House will publish a digital cookbook on May 5 to benefit restaurants and their workers, priced at $5.99, FAMILY MEAL: Recipes from Our Community. It features over 40 recipes by chefs and home cooks who publish with PRH imprint, covering what they are cooking and drinking at home right now, and all proceeds will benefit the RWCF COVID 19 Crisis Relief Fund. It includes a foreword from Restaurant Workers’ Community Fund co-founder […]
Continuing Strong Sales For American Dirt, A Very Stable Genius
AMERICAN DIRT by Jeanine Cummins sold another 36,000 hardcovers in its second week on sale, as tracked by NPD Bookscan. That left it as the clear No. 1 title in adult fiction — though A VERY STABLE GENIUS by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker remained the No. 1 title overall, growing in its second week with sales of 59,000 hardcovers, followed by PROFILES IN CORRUPTION by Peter Schweizer as the No. 2 title, ahead of American Dirt. For the same sales week, Bookstat.com estimated additional sales of 21,400 ebooks for American Dirt, and 16,700 digital audios. In those formats, it […]
Next Week’s Bestellers
We told you last week in our first experimental post that BookStat.com showed online pre-orders for AMERICAN DIRT of 9,190 hardcovers; 10,436 ebooks; and 3,088 audiobooks. From publication day through Saturday June 25, to align with bestseller lists, BookStat shows online sales of another 8,913 copies, ebook sales of 10,971 units, and digital audio sales of 13,623. Since Bookstat is monitoring online print sales for Amazon only, that suggests the full print sale will register at somewhere between two and three times what they monitor — so, with pre-orders included since that’s how bestseller lists work in opening week, a […]