Steady growth: the name of the game
by Rob - February 21st, 2010.Filed under: Bestsellers Lists.
I’ve had seven different new mass-market paperback releases in the last decade. Here they are, in Canadian besteller order (from most copies sold to least):
- FlashForward (published in mass-market 2000)
- Rollback (2008)
- Mindscan (2006)
- Hominids (2003)
- Calculating God (2001)
- Hybrids (2005)
- Humans (published 2004)
Of course, FlashForward — the oldest book on the list — is an outlier, because it’s had a huge boost in sales in the last six months thanks to the TV series based on it.
Setting it aside, this is pretty much exactly what one would hope for: my sales have risen steadily with each new standalone book over the past decade: Rollback (my most-recent mass-market paperback) did better than Mindscan, which did better than Hominids, which did better than Calculating God.
Humans and Hybrids suffered a bit from being the second and third volumes of a trilogy — not everyone who read the first book (a Hugo winner) came back for the other two. I suspect Humans, the second volume, showing lower sales than the third is an artifact of Tor foolishly letting it go out of stock for an extended period (but it’s back in print in mass-market now).
And now on to the mass-market paperback for Wake, which comes out at the end of next month.
Robert J. Sawyer online:
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