Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers
#1 Innocent in Death
February was "Nora Roberts Movie Month" on Lifetime TV, with four Nora Roberts novels premiering on the station (Angels Fall, Montana Sky, Blue Smoke and Carolina Moon).They were a ratings success, with each movie averaging five million viewers. In cross-promotion with Putnam/Berkley, Lifetime TV posted an excerpt from Innocent in Death on its Web site. It is the 24th Robb book and the first hardcover Robb title to debut at the top of several national bestseller lists. Putnam reports 410,150 copies in print.
#10 Hannibal Rising
Despite tepid reviews, the fourth novel featuring Hannibal Lecter is still on firm footing on our bestseller list. The movie adaptation, however, with a screenplay by Thomas Harris, may be on shakier ground. The Silence of the Lambs prequel opened in 3,000 theaters on February 9, bringing in more than $13 million. By the February 23 weekend, however, business dropped a sharp 73%, moving the film from its second-place opening down to #13, with a meager $1,069 per engagement.
#11 Natural Born Charmer
"Several years ago I was autographing at BEA, about the same time that Patricia Gaffney's The Goodbye Summer was released.... A woman started telling me about her book club. I recommended Gaffney's book as their next pick.... I turned around to see Jane Friedman, HarperCollins CEO, beaming at me. [She] let me know how touched she was that I was promoting another Harper author. Fortunately, I was too taken aback to say that I would have promoted Pat's terrific book even if she wasn't a Harper author."
—Phillips on the romance blog SquawkRadio.
#13 Ten Days in the Hills
"Smiley delivers a delightful, subtly observant sendup of Tinseltown folly, yet she treats her characters, their concern with compelling surfaces and their perpetual quest to capture reality through artifice, with warmth and seriousness. In their shallowness, she finds a kind of profundity."
—From PW's starred review of Jane Smiley's latest bestseller, which has 90,000 copies in print. The much-lauded author launched a nine-city tour on February 21.
Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers
#1 The Secret
Combined sales for The Secret for the week ending February 25 at B&N, Borders, Waldenbooks and Amazon.com was 141,000+ copies. That's at least five times the lead fiction hardcover, Innocent in Death; its sales total was around 27,000. S&Shas placed the biggest reorder in its history—two million more copies, bringing the total to 3.75 million. The book has garnered much media coverage, somefeaturing PW's Sara Nelson (see Editorial, p. 7).As she said in Newsweek (Mar. 5):"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the desperate unhappiness of the American public."
#5 Somebody's Gotta Say It
"I've come to the reluctant but inescapable conclusion that roughly 50% of the adults in this country are simply too ignorant and functionally incompetent to be living in a free society. You might think I'm off base, but every day around half the people in this country go out of their way to prove me right."
—From Neal Boortz's new bestseller
#14: Palestine Peace Not Apartheid
It's PW's policy not to include subtitles on our nonfiction hardcover bestseller list, and thus, for 11 weeks, we've listed Jimmy Carter's newest bestseller simply as Palestine. According to the folks at Simon & Schuster, however, the full title of the book is Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. The book has no subtitle. Therefore, we have amended our list to give the whole name. (Note that while You: On a Diet appears to include a subtitle, according to its publisher, Free Press, that is actually the full title. The book does have a subtitle: "The Owner's Manual for Waist Management.")
#15: Power, Faith and Fantasy
Michael Oren's Power, Faith, and Fantasy is back on the charts, with 110,000 copies in print after six printings. Oren met his editor Robert Weil in 1999 when Weil was a Jerusalem Book Fair Editorial Fellow. They became friends and often discussed their favorite subject—history. During dinner in early 2002, they noted there was no single-volume history of America and the Middle East. On a napkin, the two charted out 20 chapters that could be covered in such a book, and Weil commissioned Oren to write it. The rest is publishing history.
