Our November 11 Behind the Bestsellers column addressed the falloff of unit sales for several brand-name authors (including King, Clancy, Clark and Grafton) this season. The New York Times, the Washington Post and other newspapers picked up on these figures and talked about the "erosion in the sales of brand-name authors" (Martin Arnold in the NYT on March 5). Michael Crichton's Prey, #1 on the national charts, including PW's, was offered by reporters as an example of a big book not meeting sales expectations. Not true! First-week sales for Prey at the three national chains—Barnes & Noble, Borders and Waldenbooks—are ahead of first-week sales for his last hardcover bestseller, Timeline, published in November 1999. In its first week, Prey was also ahead of Crichton's 1996 bestseller Airframe. How much ahead? About 65% each time. No wonder HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman and other HC executives resented the allegation of slower-than-usual sales for their star author. It's too soon to predict how well the current top hardcover seller will do throughout the critical 2002 gift-buying season. Timeline enjoyed a 21-week run on the charts back in 1999, four of them in the #1 spot. Knopf reported sales of about 1,350,000 copies sold in the last two months of 1999, making it the fifth bestselling fiction that year. And for Christmas 1996, Airframe sold about 85,000 copies in two weeks just at Barnes & Noble.