This Week's Bestsellers: March 9, 2015

The Oscar Effect

It may be an honor just to be nominated, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into book sales come awards time. At the 2015 Oscars, page-to-screen adaptations were well represented among nominees, but only Still Alice took home a Big Five award, for best actress Julianne Moore.* Here’s a look at how trade paper movie tie-ins did in the week following the ceremony, compared to the prior week.

*Birdman, whose plot centers on a stage production based on Raymond Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” nabbed Best Picture, as well as garnering the directing Oscar for Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Vintage’s trade paper edition of the Carver collection of the same name is up 70%, from 306 to 521 print units.

Banding Together

Girl in a Band, a memoir by Sonic Youth founding member Kim Gordon, lands on our Hardcover Nonfiction list this week at #6, with 6,373 print units sold. The rock memoir is an autobiographical staple, though, just as men often crowd center stage, the majority of high-profile reminiscences are written by rock gods rather than goddesses. Here, we look debut weeks for books by Gordon and a few of her sisters in song.

The Art of the Bestseller

Making its debut on our Trade Paperback list is The Art of Having It All, by Christy Whitman, at #13 with 7,913 units sold. Whitman’s publisher, TVGuestpert, is a media development company founded by TV producer, show runner, and talent booker Jacquie Jordan. Whitman’s book has already sold out on Amazon, so Jordan seems to have succeeded at her goal as laid out on the TVGuestpert website: “raising the profile of each guest expert and thereby growing the business and brand of each client.”