This Week's Bestsellers: September 15, 2014

Father Tim Is Back in Town

Debuting at #2 on our Hardcover Fiction list, Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good by Jan Karon was a good bet to open high. Nine previous volumes, beginning 20 years ago with At Home in Mitford, narrate the adventures of Episcopal priest Timothy Kavanagh; his wife, Cynthia; and the assorted locals of the tiny fictional town of Mitford, N.C., and have sold millions of copies. Though Karon originally said that the Mitford series wrapped in 2005, sales of more than 36K copies in Somewhere Safe’s debut week vindicate the author’s volte-face. PW’s review called it “a wonderful stew of smalltown characters” with names like Mule Skinner and Coot Hendrick. An ending set at Christmas suggests that the book may have nifty-gifty legs through the holidays. Karon has taken to the road to meet fans, with 800 of them showing up at a church in Dallas two days after the book released. Karon’s Facebook following, 16K strong, has been offered various sweepstakes opportunities and, even more important, access to the Orange Marmalade Cake recipe. Pro tip: do not ask how much fat is in the cake. —Marcia Z. Nelson

‘Clock’-ing in at #4

David Mitchell’s newest doorstop of a novel, The Bone Clocks, debuts at #4 on our Hardcover Fiction list, with just over 13K units sold at the outlets reporting to Nielsen BookScan. The first-week sales figure is more than double what Mitchell’s last novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, racked up in 2010; that book sold just over 6K copies in hardcover in its first week.

Mitchell’s best-known work, Cloud Atlas, which was first published by Random House as a trade paperback in 2004, had a slower start: it debuted with only 797 copies sold in its first week, before doubling the next week and selling at a consistent clip for years afterward. Its bestselling sales week came in October 2012, just before the release of the film version starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. To date, Cloud Atlas has sold well over 500K print copies, including nearly 100K copies of the movie tie-in edition in the two years since its release.

Like Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks employs Mitchell’s trademark structural pyrotechnics, complete with globetrotting stories set in different eras and the reappearance of characters from the author’s earlier novels. In the New York Times, Mitchell explains, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, how The Bone Clocks fits into his oeuvre: “In the same way that my novels are built of hyperlinked novellas, I’m sort of building what I’ve taken to calling in a highfalutin way the ‘uberbook’ out of hyperlinked novels, because I’m a megalomaniac, and I like the idea of maximum scale.” —Gabe Habash

Winfrey Off to a ‘Sure’-Footed Start

Flatiron Books’ first title, What I Know for Sure, lands at #3 on our Hardcover Fiction list with 9,473 copies sold. The book collects columns written by Oprah Winfrey that have appeared monthly in O, the Oprah Magazine. Bob Miller, founder of the new Macmillan imprint, said he is “quite pleased with early sales,” especially since most of the television coverage for the book is just starting. (The book’s first TV spot was September 9 on Entertainment Tonight.) Winfrey’s fall tour also is just beginning. At her first stop, in Atlanta over September 5–6, What I Know for Sure sold 2,000 copies. Seven more events are planned, which Miller believes will boost the title into the holiday season.—Jim Milliot

Reaching for the Top

Lee Child’s Personal, his 19th novel featuring vigilante loner Jack Reacher (aka “Sherlock Homeless,” as one character quips in this installment), debuts at #1 on our Hardcover Fiction list. Child’s debut, Killing Floor (1997), won both the Anthony and the Barry awards for Best First Mystery, and The Enemy (2004) won the Barry and Nero awards for Best Novel. When the Crime Writers’ Association awarded Lee the 2013 Diamond Dagger, Peter James, chair of the CWA, said, “Lee is one of the few British crime thriller authors to have become a global brand name; he is also an extremely charming and open person and a tireless promoter of our genre.”

Foreign rights in the Reacher series have sold in more than 40 territories and there are nearly 100 million copies of the Reacher novels in all formats worldwide. All titles have been optioned for film, the first of which, Jack Reacher, was released in December 2012 and starred Tom Cruise. On September 10, Child, who lives in New York City, held a signing appearance at Yankee Stadium, and later threw out the ceremonial first pitch in the Yankees’ 8–5 win against the Tampa Bay Rays that evening.—Peter Cannon

A ‘Serious’ Reception for a Webcomic Turned Book

If a 30-year-old former NASA roboticist turned professional webcomic artist wrote a book in which he used mathematics and science to extrapolate explanations for some of life’s more inscrutable mysteries, would people want to read it? Answer: seems likely, especially if the author in question is Randall Munroe, creator of the popular webcomic Xkcd, described in its tagline as a “stick-figure strip featuring humor about technology, science, mathematics, and relationships.” Munroe’s What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions debuts this week at #1 on our Hardcover Nonfiction list, with more than 35K copies sold.

According to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, when it came to publishing Munroe’s book, there were no what ifs concerning its reception in the marketplace: it was more a question of just how much of a splash it would make. HMH’s Lori Glazer told PW earlier this year that when Munroe announced on his website that he had signed a book deal, “preorders went crazy”; after three runs, there are 300K copies in print. Munroe’s been making the rounds: he followed last week’s appearance on The Colbert Report with an interview on NPR and a plug by Phil Plait on his Bad Astronomy blog on Slate. The author’s TED Talk this past spring has garnered 1,235,231 views, and counting. —Claire Kirch

A Boost for Joan Rivers’s ‘Diary’

Sales of Joan Rivers’s Diary of a Mad Diva soared in the week following her death on September 4. The book, which pubbed July 1, sold 747 copies the week ended August 31 according to Nielsen BookScan, and for the week ended September 7, it sold 5,009 copies—a 570% increase that lands the title at #8 on PW’s Hardcover Nonfiction list. To date, it’s sold nearly 20K copies. The paperback of Rivers’ previous book, I Hate Everyone...Starting with Me, released April 2013, also saw a dramatic increase in sales, selling 42 copies the week ended August 31 and 475 copies the following week. That book, at #306 on Amazon’s bestseller chart at presstime, is taking one to three weeks to ship from the company. No one from Berkley was available to comment on plans for going back to press.—Clare Swanson

Top 10 Overall