We’ll try to keep this as brief as possible. Barnes & Noble announced Wednesday that sales of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman “at its bookstores nationwide have surpassed first day sales of all other adult trade fiction books in its company history, including Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, the previous bestselling book, which was published in 2009.” Mostly that release shows that BN still has a little PR savvy left in them, since the declaration is not all that different from Amazon’s earlier note that Watchman was their “most pre-ordered print title since the 2007 release” of Harry Potter […]
Opening Sales
People, Etc.
Man Asian Literary Prize winner for the novel Please Look After Mom Shin Kyung-sook admitted that her short story “Legend,” published in a 1996 collection, copies from a work by the late Yukio Mishima. “As I compared the sentences I couldn’t believe it myself,” she told the Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper. “I cannot trust my own memory” about reading Mishima, she said. “I sincerely apologize to the literary writer who raised the issue as well as all my acquaintances, and above all, many readers who read my novels…. Everything is my fault.” Changbi Publishers is removing the current edition of the story collection […]
People, Etc.
Paul Crichton is leaving Simon & Schuster Children’s, where he is vp, executive director of publicity, on June 27, after more than nine years. Crichton plans to “to take some time off this summer and literally travel around the world as he mulls the next steps in his career.” President and publisher of S&S Children’s Jon Anderson commended Crichton in a statement for “garnering a significant amount of attention for our titles” by the likes of Scott Westerfield, Cassandra Clare, Rachel Renee Russell, John Lithgow, and Ellen Hopkins…His contacts with the press, his reputation within children’s publishing, and his relationships […]
Softer Early Sales Figures For Clinton’s HARD CHOICES
Several news reports in advance of Wednesday’s full Nielsen Bookscan count, offer premature judgments about the opening sales figures for Hillary Clinton’s HARD CHOICES. BuzzFeed reports, based on the Barnes & Noble sales feed managed by Bookscan, that the book topped Barnes & Noble’s bestseller list with “just over 24,000 hardcover copies sold” in its first week on sale, 319 copies ahead of Diana Gabaldon’s novel WRITTEN IN MY OWN HEART’S BLOOD. From that data point the piece concludes “the numbers do indicate that Hard Choices has not performed as well in its first week as Clinton’s first memoir, LIVING HISTORY, did […]
People, Etc.
Simon & Schuster has reorganized its manufacturing and production department in a bid to “further integrate the design and creation of ebooks into the earliest stages of our overall production process, as well as forge closer ties between our Adult publishing groups and the design, copyediting and production teams that create our books.” Irene Kheradi has been promoted to vp, executive managing editor of production and copy editing. Samantha Cohen moves up to vp, design and digital content development. Angela Hsiao has been named vp, demand planning and reprints. And Joe Bulger moves up to vp, client management and business development. […]
New Wimpy Kid Starts with Over A Million Units
Abrams announced that Jeff Kinney’s Diary of A Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck, the eighth book in his bestselling series, sold over 1.3 million copies around the world in its first week on sale. Abrams ceo Michael Jacobs says in the announcement that sales “have exceeded all our expectations. We’re thrilled that the new book has debuted so strongly. This is just the beginning, as there is lots more excitement to come with the tours, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, and the holiday shopping season ahead.” Nielsen Bookscan recorded sales of over 80,000 books in the UK, and over 387,000 […]