Bestseller Stat Shot
Easter is a great reason to hide some colored eggs from the kids, gorge on chocolate, and have a big ol’ feast with the family—plus, depending on where in the country you live, it’s also the starter pistol for seersucker season. For publishers, it’s a great time to be in the bunny book business. Nineteen of the 100 top-selling books in the country last week had the words “Easter” or “bunny” in their titles, and our children’s picture book bestseller list has more rabbits than a pet store (indeed, board books as a format are up 52% in the week). Here are the top Easter-related movers and shakers, ranked in order of sales growth during the week leading up to Easter (April 20), compared to the previous week.
From the Newsletters
Writing tips from Dinaw Mengestu, the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” and one of the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.”
Digital publisher Storybird expands on its picture book platform to long-form and serialized works.
Inside the Hungry Girl bestseller machine.
Talking with G. Willow Wilson about Kamala, Marvel’s Muslim feminist superhero.
The most-read review on publishersweekly.com last week was This Is Ridiculous This Is Amazing by Jason Good (Chronicle).
Blogs
What the Doubleday shipping office looked like in 1939, Crime and Punishment in pie chart form, imagining the crab and avocado salad from The Bell Jar, and more.
Why kids don’t outgrow picture books as fast as many parents think they do.
Authors
What happens when 1% of the population is objectively better than the rest? That question drives Marcus Sakey’s A Better World (Amazon/Thomas & Mercer). We talk to Sakey about the future, and about why it’s easier to write a novel than a slogan for a billboard.
Podcasts
Hans Christian Andersen Award–winner Peter Sís talks about his new picture book, The Pilot and the Little Prince: The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (FSG).
Discussing Amazon’s acquisition of Comixology, plus the latest on comics making the rounds on Kickstarter.
PW senior writer Andrew Albanese looks ahead to BEA, and to BookCon—the ambitious BEA offshoot intended to bring the general public into the action.
Listen to these and more on iTunes or here.
Dinaw Mengestu discusses his new novel, All Our Names (Knopf). Plus, PW reviews editor Annie Coreno dishes on celebrity books, and BookExpo’s Brien McDonald previews BookCon, the revamped consumer fair-within-a-fair at BEA 2014.
