Volume 261
Issue 51
12/08/2014
Bestseller Stat Shot
James Patterson’s latest thriller, Hope to Die, tops our Hardcover Fiction list, selling 63,292 print copies its first week out. It’s also the megaselling author’s first title to be released since his publisher, Hachette, agreed to new terms with Amazon after a months-long stand-off that saw, among other things, the retailer disabling preorder buttons on Hachette titles and a rising tide of discontent among consumers toward the bookselling giant. So how’d it do compared to the author’s last two thrillers, which were published this summer during the dispute? Pretty well. Here’s first week sales figures for Patterson’s four most recent adult titles, going back to Unlucky 13, published in May just before reports of the dispute surfaced.
From the Newsletters
Will Boast, whose standout memoir Epilogue (Norton/Liveright) earned a starred review from PW, shares five tips for memoir-writing.
Book-shopping with President Barack Obama, a first-person account.
Digital Manga Publishing’s ambitious plans to bring the extensive backlist of Osamu Tezuka to the U.S., over the course of 20 years.
How one enterprising chef-blogger partnered with VW and Whole Foods to promote her cookbook Kickstarter project.
The most-read review on publishersweekly.com last week was Crash & Burn by Lisa Gardner (Dutton).
Blogs
A plea to publishers from a children’s bookseller: please stop sending all those summer galleys during the holiday crush.
Podcasts
Stan Lee, co-creator of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, X-Men, and other iconic superheroes, discusses his new series for children, the Zodiac Legacy (Disney Press).
A. David Lewis, author of American Comics, Literary Theory and Religion: The Superhero Afterlife (Palgrave Macmillan), talks about depictions of the afterlife in comics, particularly superhero comic books, as well as the rise in popularity of comics as a subject for serious academic study.
PW senior writer Andrew Albanese goes in depth on PW’s publishing people of the year, looks at the top library stories of 2014, and breaks down the latest twist in the decade-old Google Books case.
Events
Publishers Weekly and the Bologna Children’s Book Fair join Nielsen for the Children’s Book Summit on December 12 at the McGraw-Hill auditorium in New York City. Programming includes new data on the evolving children’s book market, and information about how successful content is integrated across multiple platforms.
Revisit two great interviews from earlier this year: Michael Paterniti talking about The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese (Dial), and Dinaw Mengestu discussing his novel, All Our Names (Knopf).
