Lucky for Sebold

Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones slips to #2 as it begins its fourth month on the national charts, with more than half its tenure in the #1 slot. That's a slide almost all authors would like to be on. The stats are worth repeating—a 250,000-copy 18th printing makes 2,175,000 copies in print. That's a long climb from the 35,000 first printing that Little, Brown launched the book with in early July. Her earlier book, Lucky, a memoir about being raped while in college, was published in August 1999 to excellent reviews. LB's trade imprint, Back Bay Books, published the trade paper edition this month and so far has 250,000 copies in print after three trips to press. Sebold's husband, Glen David Gold, is touring for another trade paperback poised for the bestseller chart—Carter Beats the Devil. Publisher Hyperion reports 60,000 hardcover copies in print, and the first trade paper printing is 70,000. Both appeared on the Today show last Friday and Sebold taped Charlie Rose the same day (air date not yet set). The two authors met at the MFA program at the University of California and were married last year.