By late afternoon yesterday Barnes & Noble was ready to exult that Dan Brown’s THE LOST SYMBOL had set a new one-day sales record for adult fiction at the chain (without specifying which book held the previous record, or quantifying the new record). It also set a new mark for adult fiction pre-orders and perhaps…
Statistics
The Most Reviewed Books and Imprints of 2008
It was a year of enormous upheaval in the world of newspaper book reviewing, and yet in many respects everything stayed exactly the same. As monitored by our Book Review Index, tracking full-length reviews in the nation’s most widely circulated newspapers, total reviews declined approximately 7.5 percent during the year, with 7,855 reviews tabulated in…
NBA Sales: The Starting Line
By our informal online sales monitoring at Amazon and BN.com, the Obama Book Club recommendations continue to outpace Wednesday night’s National Book Award winners: Doris Kearns Goodwin: 14/17Tom Daschle: 18/49Jonathan Alter: 73/126 with Peter Mathiessen’s Shadow Country the closest contender. But, as more than one observer has pointed out via e-mail, the starting bar for…
Brisingr Opening Day Sales
Random House Children’s announced first-day sales of 550,000 copies for Christopher Paolini’s BRISINGR, the biggest one-day sale ever for a book from the division. The publisher says that number is four times the opening day sale of Paolini’s previous title, ELDEST, in 2005. (That book was estimated to have sold 425,000 copies in the first…
DrudgeScan Returns
Flash: Matt Drudge has renewed his interest in selected Bookscan sales figures. Today he features opening week numbers for Thomas Friedman’s HOT, FLAT AND CROWDED (69,285) versus Bob Woodward’s THE WAR WITHIN (55,432).
This Week's Hot Titles?
The WSJ highlights three prominent releases this week–Andrew Davidson’s THE GARGOYLE; David Carr’s THE NIGHT OF THE GUN; and Ron Suskind’s THE WAY OF THE WORLD: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism (the biggest of the three by far, with an announced 500,000-copy first printing)–as a potential counterpoint to “the…
