This Week's Bestsellers: February 16, 2015

A Ghost, No Longer Invisible

A languishing memoir meets a new podcast. The result? Publishing magic. In Ghost Boy, South African Web designer Martin Pistorius recalls the dozen or so years he suffered from locked-in syndrome, unable to move or communicate with the outside world. Nelson Books (an imprint of Thomas Nelson) published the autobiography in the U.S. in 2013 with a small print run, to weak sales and, the publisher says, “lousy” media attention. Then, on Jan. 9, 2015, NPR’s All Things Considered previewed “The Secret History of Thoughts,” the first episode of its new Invisibilia podcast, which featured Pistorius’s story. The podcast launched the next day, and from there things snowballed: online coverage in the Washington Post, People, and many other outlets. The book trailer garnered more than one million views on YouTube in 72 hours. NBC aired the first U.S. interview with Pistorius on January 29, and more national TV coverage followed. How has this affected sales? According to outlets reporting to Nielsen BookScan, as of January 11, Ghost Boy had sold just 196 copies since publication. A month later, BookScan shows cumulative print sales of 22,877 units, with 12,180 units sold this week alone. Nelson went back to print January 15 and a few times since, for a total print run of about 195K units to date. And between Janaury 9 and January 18, before physical stock was widely available, Nelson sold more than 18,000 e-books.

A Rare Appearance

Scott McCloud may be best known as the comics theorist behind the nonfiction titles Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006), which together have sold more than 202K copies since 2004 (the earliest BookScan records available). But he’s also a comics creator in his own right, and his first graphic novel in over 15 years, The Sculptor, debuts on our Hardcover Fiction list this week at #23, with 2,082 print units sold. It’s not every week that a graphic novel makes the list, and this one could continue selling well, thanks to plenty of mainstream media attention (the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, PBS Newshour, and others) and an extensive tour that includes several U.S. states and six European countries.

Oh, the Places They Go

What’s up with the Dr. Seuss titles cracking our Top 10 Overall list? It’s the annual run-up to the National Education Association’s Read Across America Day, held on March 2—which is also the birthday of Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss). See p. 16 for all of the Dr. Seuss titles that made our Picture Book list, plus a few by other authors from the Geisel-cofounded Beginner Books imprint; if past years are any indication, you can expect them to stick around for a while.

Top 10 Overall