This Week's Bestsellers: March 30, 2015

Not-So-Little Sales on the Prairie

Pioneer Girl, the annotated Laura Ingalls Wilder memoir, returns to our Hardcover Nonfiction list for the first time since the week ending February 1, when it debuted at #7 with 8,316 units sold. This week, it’s #2 in Hardcover Nonfiction with 18,926 sold—and #8 overall (see Top 10 Overall, below). The book, which at press time is out of stock at several major online retailers, has had three printings totaling 75K units, and release-to-date print sales of 39,973 units. South Dakota Historical Society Press has ordered a fourth and a fifth print run, which will make another 50K copies available in the spring.

A Tale of Two Franks

Rounding out our Hardcover Nonfiction list are, at #24, Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, and at #25, Frank, by Barney Frank. Bruni, whose book examines higher education, is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and reviewed Frank’s memoir for the paper on March 15, noting that as the 16-term former congressperson “zooms through” his adolescence, young adulthood, and early career, he “says almost nothing of met or unmet romantic longings, of whether he’s dating or having sex, of how badly (or not) he wants to.” Frank, for his part, told Politico he found the review “bizarre”: “Here’s a gay man, Frank Bruni, writing about another gay man and essentially saying you can’t just write a serious book or even a humorous book... about politics, you gotta tell me how much sex you’re getting.”

A Prudent Strategy

Gail Carriger has carved out a niche in paranormal steampunk romance, beginning with the first title in her Parasol Protectorate series, 2009’s Soulless. The five books in the series, which concluded with 2012’s Timeless, have sold more than 189K units in mass market. In 2013, Carriger launched the Finishing School YA series, set in the same world 25 years earlier, with Etiquette & Espionage. Three books to date have sold 26K in hardcover, with a fourth book due out in November. This week, Carriger begins the Custard Protocal series, a spinoff from Parasol Protectorate, with Prudence, which marks her first adult hardcover release, and her debut on our Hardcover Fiction list at #23 with 2,041 units sold.

Haus Proud

Jill Alexander Essbaum’s first novel, Hausfrau, about the affairs of a bored expat housewife in Switzerland, has been generating considerable buzz since 2014’s London Book Fair, when Random House preempted world rights. It debuts at #20 on our Hardcover Fiction list with 2,311 units sold. PW starred the book in January and profiled Essbaum in our First Fiction Spring 2015 feature. And though we don’t suggest you judge the book by its cover, head over to publishersweekly.com/hausfrau to see the 100 tries it took to get the final bouquet.

Top 10 Overall

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted