As questions continue to swirl about Hillary Clinton’s potential run for the presidency in 2016, her still-unpublished book, Hard Choices (Simon & Schuster), was the most buzzed about title on social media in May. “There was a good deal of conversation on this book throughout the month, in anticipation of the June 10 release,” said Jeff Costello, v-p of CoverCake, which tracks references to titles on social media. “But the number of comments exploded [when] it was revealed that Clinton will dedicate an entire chapter to the Benghazi issue.”
Finding Me (Weinstein), Michelle Knight’s firsthand account of the decade she spent in captivity after being kidnapped by Ariel Castro in Cleveland, hit #2 on CoverCake’s chart.
Maya Angelou’s death on May 28 prompted an outpouring of tributes on social media, pushing the writer’s best-known work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Ballantine), to the #3 spot.
On May 29, Henry Holt announced that Killing Patton would be the fourth installment of Bill O’Reilly’s Killing series, joining the Fox News anchor’s bestselling titles on Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy. The book, slated for a September 23 release, will recount the final months of World War II and General Patton’s contributions to the Allied victory, while also examining his mysterious death in 1945. Martin Dugard is on board as coauthor, once again.
May was an atypical month in terms of relative volume of comments from men and women. Men generated the majority of the conversations about half of the titles on the chart, bucking the trend of women dominating online literary chatter.
CoverCake’s Top 10 Books in Social Media, May 2014
| Rank | Title | Author | BookScan | Scale** | Male | Female |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hard Choices | Hillary Clinton | NYP | 10 | 53% | 47% |
| 2 | Finding Me | Michelle Knight | 27 | 8 | 41 | 59 |
| 3 | I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Maya Angelou | NA | 7 | 48 | 52 |
| 4 | Killing Patton | O’Reilly/Dugard | NYP | 5 | 62 | 38 |
| 5 | Flash Boys | Michael Lewis | 88 | 4 | 52 | 48 |
| 6 | Divergent | Veronica Roth | 8 | 3 | 41 | 59 |
| 7 | The Fault in Our Stars | John Green | 1 | 2 | 40 | 60 |
| 8 | Think Like a Freak | Levitt/Dubner | 28 | 1 | 55 | 45 |
| 9 | The Closer | Mariano Rivera | 53 | 1 | 67 | 33 |
| 10 | Heaven Is for Real | Todd Burpo | 21 | 1 | 39 | 61 |
* For the week ended May 25. nyp=not yet published. NA=not available (the book didn’t rank in the bookscan top 100).
** number of social media conversations about the book in question for every 10 comments about book #1
