Behind the Bestsellers

The Biggest Cheese(s)
Spencer Johnson's megaselling Who Moved My Cheese? was the best performer during the course of 2000. Not only did it not miss a single week on our charts, it commanded the #1 spot 40 out of 51 times.

Hardcover fiction set some interesting records last year. More books than ever had a shot at the weekly lists--123 books had a first appearance on the 2000 charts. That breaks the 1999 record of 105 books. The previous record was set in 1990, when 90 novels debuted on that year's weekly charts. Last year, with so many landings, there was a higher number than usual (14) that had only a one-week run, so it was no surprise that for the first time, there were just four novels that racked up a tenure of 15 or more weeks on the list. The winner in this group was John Grisham's The Brethren, which was on the charts for a total of 30 weeks. Contrast the fiction numbers with those for nonfiction hardcovers, where there were 16 books that spent 15+ weeks on the 2000 charts. For more statistics on last year's bestsellers, check out our feature in next week's issue.

Teen Angst Sells
It seems that lots of teenagers received books about topical issues that are of interest to them. We know this because there are at least three such books reported by booksellers nationwide among their December bestsellers. Health Communications has a number of top sellers aimed at the teen market; its Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul III: More Stories of Life, Love and Learning by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Kimberly Kirberger has sold 1.315 million copies. Another bestseller in this line is Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul (copies sold: 560,000+).

Life Strategies for Teens by Jay McGraw is also hitting the mark in a big way. McGraw is the son of bestselling Life Strategies author Philip C. McGraw (who also wrote the foreword to his son's book). Fireside Books has 380,000 copies in print after three trips to press of the Teen book. Dad and son have been on the road together promoting both books and will be making stops in San Francisco and Atlanta this week.

Hyperion has also aimed one of its familiar series titles at teens. Richard Carlson's Don't Sweat the Small Stuff for Teens was published back in September, and was available as a special consumer offer inside five million boxes of Stouffer's Lasagna and Macaroni Cheese dinners. A free, customized copy of the book was offered to consumers who mailed in eight proofs of purchase. Book displays in supermarkets featured a consumer coupon promoting the Stouffer's offer. In October, Hyperion mailed out 16,000 copies of the book to high school guidance counselors and PTA executives. More consumer advertising followed, including ads that promoted Carlson's Web site, dontsweat.com. So far, there are 675,000 copies in print after three trips to press.

Darwin Honors the Unfit
The humor book for the holiday season may be The Darwin Awards by Wendy Northcutt, which heralds, as the book's jacket notes, "Those individuals who ensure the long-term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion." Dutton is up to 200,000 copies in print, and Northcutt's Web site (www.DarwinAwards.com) claims more than 1.5 million unique visitors since July 1999.

Holiday Countdown, Part 2
Back on December 18, we noted in this column that sales figures for the first two weeks after Thanksgiving (the official launch of the holiday shopping frenzy) showed that fewer books were enjoying the record-breaking unit sales achieved during the final weeks of 1999. Did books fare better than 1999 in the last two weeks before Christmas 2000? Not if you go by the three national chains--for the week ending December 16, Barnes & Noble reported nine hardcovers with sales of 10,000+; for the week ending December 24, B&N reported 21 such bestsellers. (The best bestseller was Who Moved My Cheese?, with a little over 40,000 copies sold.) In 1999, there were 18 and 24 books with sales of more than 10,000 in those two weeks; the best performer was Tuesdays with Morrie, with an impressive 86,000 copies sold. Borders and Waldenbooks also reported fewer books with weekly tallies of 10,000+ this year.