This Week's Bestsellers: March 2, 2015

An Accidental Hit

In 2014, Allison Pataki, daughter of former New York state governor George Pataki, made her historical fiction debut with The Traitor’s Wife, about the role socialite Peggy Shippen played in Benedict Arnold’s conspiracy. PW called the book, a trade paper original, a “surprise hit” for S&S/Howard, selling 29.5K print units according to BookScan. The publisher chose to print Pataki’s follow-up, The Accidental Empress—which follows the life of Sisi, wife of Austro-Hugarian emperor Franz Joseph—in hardcover, a decision that pays off with the #9 spot on this week’s Hardcover Fiction list.

Hiding in Plain Sight

A detective novel titled The Whites debuts at #7 on our Hardcover Fiction list this week, with 6,862 print units sold, according to outlets reporting to Nielsen BookScan. The author, per the cover, is “Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt,” a transparent pseudonym. But Price, who wrote Clockers and Lush Life, is hardly the first author of literary fiction to choose a pen name for his genre work; for example, Gore Vidal, aka Edgar Box, did it in the 1950s with his Peter Cutler Sargeant II mysteries, and in the 1980s, future Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes wrote crime fiction under the name Dan Kavanaugh. Perhaps Price’s closest, most recent antecedent is John Banville, who won the Booker in 2005 and soon after began publishing crime fiction as Benjamin Black.

Movie Tie-In Watch

The film adaptation of Insurgent, the second book in Veronica Roth’s blockbuster Divergent trilogy, opens in theaters March 20. This week, the paperback movie tie-in edition lands at #15 on our Children’s Frontlist Fiction list with 3,439 units sold, according to BookScan; the hardcover edition of the movie tie-in, released simultaneously with the paperback, sold just 115 units. The conventional paperback, which pubbed in January and has sold more than 35K units to date, is at #6 on the list this week with 5,380 units sold, though that represents a 21% drop over last week.

The New Girl

Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, at #1 in our Hardcover Fiction and #2 overall, has been hailed as the next Gone Girl—so six weeks post-release, how is it stacking up? With cumulative sales of more than 230K units, The Girl on the Train has pulled well ahead of where Gone Girl was six weeks in. At that point, Gillian Flynn’s book had sold 116K units total, was #3 on the week’s Hardcover Fiction list, and was the #11 book overall. If Hawkins’s book keeps chugging along like this, comparisons to the Flynn thriller are likely to make tracks.

Top 10 Overall