Bestseller Stat Shot
Spoiler alert: as the film adaptation of Divergent, the first book in Veronica Roth’s juggernaut dystopian trilogy, raked in $56 million at the box office in its debut weekend, sales of the book continued to climb. Divergent maintains its spot as the top-selling book in the country, and while sales have been strong all year, they really took off in the weeks leading up to the movie premiere. Here’s a breakdown of the past six weeks of unit sales of the paperback edition.
From the Newsletters
Leslie Jamison, author of the new essay collection The Empathy Exams (Graywolf), on how to write a personal essay.
Didn’t make it to Bologna? Don’t worry—check out our photo recap of the show’s highlights.
A report from the L.A. Religious Education Congress, where 40,000 Catholics bought a lot of books.
Some social media basics for DIY authors.
The most-read review on publishersweekly.com last week was, once again, The One by Kiera Cass (HarperTeen).
Blogs
Some recent highlights from the Publishers Weekly Tumblr: original reporting on the obscenity battle over Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Jules Verne’s obit from 1905, an audio recording of Flannery O’Connor reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and great moments in epigraph history.
publishersweekly.tumblr.com
What does a bookseller do when a customer finds a title offensive and asks that it be removed from the store?
Podcasts
Blake Nelson talks about his new young adult novel, The Prince of Venice Beach (Little, Brown), and describes how writing a mystery can be a bit like surfing.
A report from Middle Georgia Con, including an interview with veteran comics artist Brian Stelfreeze.
Authors
Kelly Parsons talks about bringing graphic realism to his medical thriller, Doing Harm (St. Martin’s)
The inside story on Special Forces Maj. Jim Gant, whose rise and fall is chronicled by his wife, former Washington Post reporter Ann Scott Tyson, in American Spartan (Morrow).
Screenwriter Jerome Kass switches mediums for Out of the Bronx (Asahina & Wallace), his first book of stories.
Sarah Pinborough discusses her murder mystery, Mayhem (Jo Fletcher Books), and PW senior news editor Rachel Deahl previews the big books that’ll be making the rounds at the London Book Fair.
