With the National Book Award winners due to be announced on Wednesday evening, we took a look at what the marketplace has had to say so far about the fiction nominees. Unfortunately, the NBA nominations traditionally do not have a lot of impact on the marketplace. In both total sales to date as well as sales since the nominations were announced, Colum McCann’s LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN is the clear stand-out. With just under 2,400 copies sold in the last three full weeks as recorded by Nielsen BookScan, he has outsold the rest of the field combined (the other […]
Statistics
Kinney Connects with His Readers
This week it was Wimpy Kid creator Jeff Kinney’s turn to the lift the marketplace, with a big opening for his latest installment in the series, DOG DAYS. Sales tracked by Nielsen Bookscan were approximately 507,000 copies–more than twice the big opening for Kinney’s THE LAST STRAW at the beginning of the year. Abrams CEO Michael Jacobs says the house’s own tracking estimates a first-week sale that “exceeds 750,000 copies” through the trade overall. They have gone back to press for another 500,000 copies (after an announced first printing of 4 million copies). Jacobs notes that Kinney’s backlist sales were […]
Record Breakers: Lost Symbols Moves More than 1 Million Copies and Doubleday Goes Back to Press
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 most importantly, “the company said that sales for the book were exceeding expectations.”Release In the UK, Waterstone’s fiction buyer Simon Burke reported similarly unquantified but record-breaking results to The Bookseller: “We have seen phenomenal sales for the new Dan Brown. The Lost Symbol is Waterstone’s […]
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 all. With the same astonishing regularity that we have statistically demonstrated in the past, book editors across the country worked very hard to come to the same conclusions as always. One out of every twelve full-length reviews (or 8.5 percent) went to books by Knopf. […]
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 sales of the award winners was pretty modest. According to Nielsen BookScan’s figures for sales through last Saturday, approximate sales for the NBA winners were: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed: 11,000 copiesShadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen: 6,000 copiesWhat I Saw […]
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 week on sale.) President of RH Children’s Chip Gibson says in the announcement, “We are thrilled with the first day’s sale of BRISINGR: the numbers have far surpassed our projections. We are grateful to booksellers everywhere for this incredible success and look forward with them […]