Volume 261
Issue 34
08/25/2014
Bestseller Stat Shot
YA and children’s books’ movie adaptations are driving overall sales across the country, with If I Stay, The Fault in Our Stars, The Giver, and books in the Divergent series dominating most regions. Although readers of all ages are flocking to those titles, we were curious how adult novels are faring in these waning weeks of summer. Haruki Murakami’s latest, a new release for the week ended August 17, is tops for adult fiction in the Middle Atlantic, and To Kill a Mockingbird is the best-performing adult novel in the South Central region, which includes Harper Lee’s home state of Alabama. The paperback of Gone Girl and Sue Grafton’s mass-market W Is for Wasted divvy up the rest of the country, with the alphabet mystery besting the teen and tween books in some areas. Here’s how it all breaks down.
| Region | Title | Author | Unit Sales |
|---|---|---|---|
| Northeast | Gone Girl | Gillian Flynn | 1,980 |
| Middle Atlantic | Colorless Tsukuru Tazakia and His Years of Pilgrimage | Haruki Murakami | 4,146 |
| East North Central | W Is for Wasted | Sue Grafton | 3,574 |
| West North Central | W Is for Wasted | Sue Grafton | 1,832 |
| South Atlantic* | Gone Girl | Gillian Flynn | 3,858 |
| South Central | To Kill a Mockingbrid | Harper Lee | 3,467 |
| Mountain | W Is for Wasted | Sue Grafton | 3,263 |
| Pacific | W Is for Wasted | Sue Grafton | 6,932 |
From the Newsletters
Meet the authors and editors behind four big Web-to-cookbook releases for fall.
In Kickstarter Diary, Chapter 5: The Postmortem, Todd Allen looks back on the final results and lessons learned.
We talk with Lauren Oliver about the Studio, a new digital imprint from Paper Lantern Lit.
Radhika Sanghani, author of the debut novel Virgin (Berkley Trade), picks 10 books you should read before graduating college.
Blogs
If you haven’t checked out PW’s Tumblr lately, head over there to read about the resurgence of crime novels in contemporary Egypt, George Orwell’s review of Mein Kampf, and more.
Authors: here’s how not to get attention in a bookstore.
Podcasts
Brandon Perlow, publisher of comics venture New Paradigm Studios, speaks with PW senior news editor Calvin Reid about the success of the press’s Watson & Holmes series, which reimagines the detective duo as African-American private eyes in contemporary Harlem.
Here’s a vital sign for the book business worth watching—the growth in M.F.A. programs.
Sandy Hall discusses her debut novel, A Little Something Different, which is the first title from Macmillan’s crowd-sourced YA imprint, Swoon Reads.
Webcast
We chat with Julie Kagawa, Caragh O’Brien, and coauthors Carrie Ryan and John Parke Davis about their new YA and middle-grade series, the Pirate Stream.
The most-read review on publishersweekly.com last week was Rare Bird: A Memoir of Loss and Love by Anna Whiston-Donaldson (Convergent), a “compelling account” of the death of the author’s 12-year-old son.
Author and editor Patrick Swenson discusses his debut novel, The Ultra Thin Man (Tor); and PW reviews director Louisa Ermelino explains what self-published authors can expect when they submit titles to BookLife.
