BookNet bestsellers: fiction

U.S. author Nicholas Sparks is the lucky one, as his latest novel hits the top spot on this week’s bestsellers’ list, thanks to its upcoming film adaptation starring Zac Efron.

For the two weeks ending March 11:

1. The Lucky One, Nicholas Sparks
(Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, $16.50 pa, 9781455508969)

2. Love You More, Lisa Gardner
(Bantam/Random House, $9.99 mm, 9780553591927)

3. Lone Wolf, Jodi Picoult
(Simon & Schuster, $18 cl, 9781439102749)

4. The Jungle, Clive Cussler and Jack Du Brul
(Berkley/Penguin, $10.99 mm, 9780425246542)

5. The Sixth Man, David Baldacci
(Grand Central/Hachette, $10.99 mm, 9780446573092)

6. Only Time Will Tell, Jeffrey Archer
(St. Martin’s Press/Raincoast, $11.99 mm, 9780312539566)

7. I’ve Got Your Number, Sophie Kinsella
(Dial/Random House, $15.50 cl, 9780385342063)

8. The Help, Kathryn Stockett
(Berkley/Penguin, $18.50 pa, 9780425232200)

9. Devious, Lisa Jackson
(Kensington Publishing, $9.99 mm, 9781420102758)

10. 44 Charles Street, Danielle Steel
(Dell/Random House, $9.99 mm, 9780440245179)

11. Kill Me if You Can, James Patterson
(Grand Central/Hachette, $15.99 pa, 9780446571876)

12. The Lucky One (movie tie-in edition), Nicholas Sparks
(Grand Central/Hachette, $8.99 mm, 9781455508976)

13. Against All Enemies, Tom Clancy and Peter Telap
(Penguin, $11.50 mm, 9780425246061)

14. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson
(Penguin, $18 pa, 9780143170112)

15. Live Wire, Harlan Coben
(Signet/Penguin, $10.99 mm, 9780451233936)

16. Sarah’s Key, Tatiana de Rosnay
(St. Martin’s/Raincoast, $15.50 pa, 9780312370848)

17. Flash and Bones, Kathy Reichs
(Pocket/Simon & Schuster, $17 pa, 9781451675290)

18. New York to Dallas, J.D. Robb
(Berkley/Penguin, $8.99 mm, 9780425246894)

19. The 9th Judgment, James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
(Grand Central/Hachette, $10.99 mm, 9780446565660)

20. The Thief, Clive Cussler and Justin Scott
(Putnam/Penguin, $29.50 cl, 9780399158612)

BookNet bestsellers: Fiction

Stieg Larsson’s thrillers dominate this week’s list following the release of David Fincher’s U.S. remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Canadians Esi Edugyan and Patrick deWitt also appear with Half-Blood Blues (#5) and The Sisters Brothers (#7).

For the two weeks ending Jan. 8:

1. The Help, Kathryn Stockett
(Penguin, $18.50 pa, 9780425232200)

2. The Jefferson Key, Steve Berry
(Ballantine/Random House, $11.99 mm, 9780345505521)

3. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson
(Penguin, $18 pa, 9780143170112)

4. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson
(Penguin, $18 pa, 9780143170136)

5. Half-Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan
(Thomas Allen Publishers, $24.95 pa, 9780887627415)

6. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
(Penguin, $18 pa, 9780143170129)

7. The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt
(House of Anansi Press, $22.95 pa, 9781770890329)

8. Toys, James Patterson and Neil McMahon
(Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, $10.99 mm, 9780446571746)

9. Before I Go to Sleep, S.J. Watson
(HarperCollins, $21.99 pa, 9781443404068)

10. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (movie tie-in edition), Stieg Larsson
(Penguin, $18 pa, 9780143186007)

11. Sarah’s Key, Tatiana de Rosnay
(St. Martin’s Griffin/Raincoast, $15.50 pa, 9780312370848)

12. Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James
(Knopf Canada, $32 cl, 9780307362032)

13. A Discovery of Witches, Deborah Harkness
(Penguin, $17 pa, 9780143119685)

14. Locked On, Tom Clancy
(Putnam/Penguin, $31 cl, 9780399157318)

15. The Book of Negroes: Illustrated Edition, Lawrence Hill
(HarperCollins Canada, $19.99 cl, 9781443412193)

16. The Next Always, Nora Roberts
(Berkley/Penguin, $18.50 pa, 9780425243213)

17. One Summer, David Baldacci
(Grand Central/Hachette, $14.99 pa, 9780446583152)

18. Moonlight in the Morning, Jude Deveraux
(Pocket Star/Simon & Schuster, $9.99 mm, 9781416509745)

19. Private: #1 Suspect, James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
(Little, Brown and Company/Hachette, $29.99 cl, 9780316097406)

20. Innocent, Scott Turow
(Grand Central/Hachette, $10.99 mm, 9780446562409)

Book sales down “dramatically” in Q1 of 2011

The bad news for booksellers just seems to keep coming. Today, Publishers Weekly reports that Canadian book sales “dropped dramatically” in the first quarter of 2011 according to figures released by BookNet Canada. The market was depressed in both units sold (down 10.9 per cent) and dollar sales (10.8 per cent), and numbers were down across all categories of physical books, with fiction taking the biggest hit (16.9 per cent in units and 15.4 per cent in dollars).

From PW:

BookNet CEO Noah Genner attributed the drop to a combination of factors, including the sale of digital books, tough economic conditions and the lack of the type of blockbuster hits that have buoyed sales in recent years. “There are some books doing well, but there hasn’t been anything of the volume that we’ve seen in the last few years like with Twilight, Stieg Larsson and [Harry] Potter before that. And there is definitely some portion of that going to e-books.”

A BookNet Canada press release explains how they arrived at what can only be considered dismal figures for booksellers:

All figures for this report have been drawn from BookNet Canada’s national book sales tracking system, BNC SalesData, using the year-over-year sales from a fixed panel of 665 retail locations from across the country.

We maintain this 665-store subset of our 1,600 reporting stores, also known as a ring fence, which includes only stores that have been contributing data since [2006-07]. These are the only stores we look at for year-over-year comparisons. Any stores that have been added since 2007 are excluded from year-over-year calculations. This means that the addition of new stores in the past two years is not a factor in any reported change in market performance.

Book links round-up: scathing reviews, foggy plot lines, and more

• An excerpt from Eva Gabrilsson’s book about her life with Stieg Larsson
• How much do we actually retain from reading?
• Slate explains h0w not to write a book review
• Stephen King’s The Dark Tower will not be adapted for film
• The book is always better, but better than the app?
• A Literary Press Group/Turner-Riggs survey for poetry readers

Harry Potter, Dan Brown dominate U.K. list of best-selling books

The stereotype has it that England is filled with recondite literati ensconced in mahogany-lined libraries reading leather-bound volumes of Romantic poetry and plump Victorian novels. This as compared to the beer-swilling philistines in America, gorging themselves on a diet of Dan Brown and Tom Clancy (if they read at all). Well, newly released data indicates that this conception is flawed. Readers in the U.K., it would seem, have every bit as much devotion to Dan Brown as their counterparts across the Atlantic.

As noted in the Guardian over the weekend, Brown took the number one spot on Neilsen Bookscan’s list of the U.K.’s best-selling books released since the company began collecting data in 1998. According to the service, which tracks 90 per cent of book purchases in the U.K., The Da Vinci Code moved 4,522,025 units between 1998 and 2010, which accounted for a staggering £22,857,837.53 in revenue. Angels and Demons, Brown’s prequel to The Da Vinci Code, took the fourth spot on the list, with 3,096,850 units sold, accounting for sales of £15,537,324.84.

Not surprisingly, the bulk of the top 10 is devoted to Harry Potter: all seven of J.K. Rowling’s books about the boy wizard are featured, with the first in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, taking the number two spot. The only place in the top 10 not devoted to Brown or Rowling goes to Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight, which clocks in at number nine. In fact, one has to make it to number 13 before a title by an author not among the three already mentioned appears: Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.

Perhaps surprisingly, Stieg Larsson does not crop up on the list until number 17, although the three novels in the Swedish author’s Millennium Trilogy came in at numbers one, two, and three respectively on the list of U.K. bestsellers for 2010.

Daily book biz round-up: Larsson would’ve made bad celebrity; Kobo featured on new BlackBerry tablet; and more

Today’s book news:

• Stieg Larsson wouldn’t have taken well to celebrity, says friend
• Kobo featured on new BlackBerry PlayBook
• But PlayBook is aimed at business people, not readers
• Jonathan Lethem to leave Brooklyn
• Fun! A literary map of New York

The Grand Design gets angry reviews

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Grand Design (Bantam Books) was Amazon’s top seller upon its release on Tuesday. It has since fallen to the fourth spot, raking in less than Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy but more than Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom [even without Barack Obama getting an ARC].

Co-authored by the world’s most recognizable living physicist, the book uses science to answer ancient questions about the purpose of life. According to Amazon, The Grand Design illustrates how we “create history by observing it” and dives into the M-theory, described as the “theory of everything.”

The Twitter community brings up The Grand Design every few minutes while a few religious groups get riled up over the book’s ideas. One scientist and former head of the Royal Institution in the U.K. even described Hawking’s determined convictions as “Taliban-like.” After all, according to the Telegraph, Hawking and Mlodinow (more or less) deny the existence of God, writing the following: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”

In the midst of it all, The New York Times’ Dwight Garner has given the book another slap:

The real news about The Grand Design, however, isn’t Mr. Hawking’s supposed jettisoning of God, information that will surprise no one who has followed his work closely. The real news about The Grand Design is how disappointingly tinny and inelegant it is. The spare and earnest voice that Mr. Hawking employed with such appeal in A Brief History of Time has been replaced here by one that is alternately condescending, as if he were Mr. Rogers explaining rain clouds to toddlers, and impenetrable.

Garner later describes the co-authors as “an awkward pair, part A Beautiful Mind, part borscht belt,” and the book as “provocative pop science, an exploration of the latest thinking about the origins of our universe. But the air inside this literary biosphere is not especially pleasant to breathe.”

Q&Q has yet to smell the air in The Grand Design‘s literary biosphere. But it’s easy to see why Hawking and Mlodinow might get condescending: they are writing about creation, a subject we’ve failed to get any real grasp of for thousands of years.

Daily book biz round-up: Google counts books; Arsenal Pulp moves; and more

Today’s book news:

• Q: How many books are there are in the world? A: 129,864,880
• Is Amazon any different than the robber barons of old?
• Arsenal Pulp moves to new offices
• How Stieg Larsson turned Quercus into a playah
• ChiZine editors named guests of honor at World Horror convention
• Richard Price to adopt pseudonym for presumably trashy thriller series

Daily book biz round-up: The Girl Who Went to Canada; Palin for tykes; and more

Start your week with these news bits:

• Unfinished fourth volume in Stieg Larsson’s “Millenium” series set in Canadian Arctic
• CNQ sends André Alexis a note of thanks
• Zondervan to sell Sarah Palin to the kiddies
• U.S. authors dominate Frank O’Connor short story prize shortlist
• The Graphic Novel of Anne Frank

Daily book biz round-up: e-reader pricing war; Stieg Larsson no feminist; and more

Tasty news bits:

• E-reader pricing madness! Nook goes down to $149! Kindle goes down to $189!
• Kooky inventor dude Ray Kurzweil invents e-reading software
• Stieg Larsson sorry excuse for a feminist, argues EW
• Geoffrey Hill wins Oxford professor of poetry position; no controversy ensues
• Why has the Google Book Search settlement stalled?