bestseller lists

For All Nerds

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Last week I was a guest on the For All Nerds podcast with Tatiana King and DJ Benhameen, talking about Lovecraft Country (my appearance starts at the 33:30 mark). This was my second visit to the ‘cast—I was previously a guest back in 2017, when they were known as the Fan Bros Show—and just like last time, I really enjoyed myself. For more Lovecraft Country conversation, be sure and check out the weekly “Safe Negro Podcast” editions of For All Nerds, where they go in-depth on each episode of the HBO series (starting with “Sundown,” here).

In other news:

* I am still answering reader questions over at Goodreads.

* On October 2 at 5 PM Pacific Time, I’ll be making a remote appearance as part of Novel Nights, a fundraiser to support Seattle’s Hugo House. If you’d like to contribute, you can buy tickets to individual events—other featured authors are Erik Larsen, Pramila Jayapal, Jess Walter, Sharyn Skeeter, and Neal Bascomb—or get a full series pass to all six Novel Nights.

* As of today, Lovecraft Country is on the New York Times bestseller list for the fourth week in a row!

#5

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It was only a couple of days ago that I gently corrected an interviewer who’d referred to Lovecraft Country as a bestseller. Although sales of the novel had increased significantly since the premiere of the HBO series, so far as I knew it had only achieved bestseller status in some very specific Amazon subgenre categories.

But yesterday afternoon, the New York Times, continuing its tradition of giving me early birthday presents, made it official: On September 6, Lovecraft Country will debut at #5 on the trade paperback fiction bestseller list.

To say that I am thrilled about this would be an understatement. Before I go back to bouncing off the walls with glee, I wanted to say a quick thanks to the many folks who helped bring this book into the world, starting with my cadre of editors at HarperCollins: Tim Duggan, who bought Lovecraft Country but left Harper to work at Random House before I delivered the manuscript; Barry Harbaugh and Maya Ziv, who did the actual editing; and my current editor, Jennifer Brehl, who saw me through publication after Maya went to work at Penguin. I’m grateful as well to Jonathan Burnham, my Friend in High Places; my awesome production editor and fellow language nerd, Lydia Weaver; and my publicists, Rachel Elinsky and Heather Drucker.

My biggest thank you goes to my agent Melanie Jackson, who’s been looking out for me since 1987, when she sold Fool on the Hill to Atlantic Monthly Press just six months after I graduated Cornell University. This is her success too, and I’m very glad we’ve both lasted long enough to enjoy it.

#5!

Bad Monkeys, minigoats, etc.

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Bad Monkeys‘ fourth printing, consisting of 5,000 copies, arrived at HarperCollins’ warehouse last week, and after filling all the outstanding back orders, they’re down to just 800. A fifth printing of 5,000 more copies has been scheduled for October 1st. Despite the difficulty some stores have been having keeping the book stocked, Monkeys is still hanging on at #39 on the Book Sense national bestseller list and at #6 on the Pacific Northwest regional list.

Meanwhile, in the local news, the Seattle City Council has voted to allow the keeping of minigoats as pets. As you may recall from my previous minigoat blog post, one of the official rationales for doing this is that minigoats “have some sustainability benefits in that you can grow [sic] your own milk and cheese.” However, a letter to the editor in today’s Seattle P-I points out that goats only give milk after giving birth, which is a problem since the new law stipulates that male goats must be neutered.

Finally, Cute Overload wants to remind you that it’s not just goats that can be made smaller:

Yes, that’s right, it’s a seeing-eye pony (actually, a miniature guide horse), coming off an airplane. And it’s wearing little horse-sneakers, although one of them seems to have gotten lost along the way:

While I was out of the country…

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…Bad Monkeys reached the #15 spot on the Book Sense national bestseller list.

…the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer simul-published their reviews of the novel. Though neither is an unqualified rave, both say enough nice things about me that, by the time HarperCollins’ P.R. machine gets done excerpting them, they will be remembered as unqualified raves. Be warned that the P-I review contains plot spoilers.

…the San Francisco Chronicle, having already run the Associated Press’s love letter to Bad Monkeys, decided to give me another three paragraphs in a round-up of summertime sci-fi adventures.

…the corn I had planted in the front yard, mostly on a lark, set its first cobs.

…Bookreporter.com weighed in here.

…HarperCollins decided to order a fourth printing of Bad Monkeys—five thousand more copies, due from the printers on September 7th, which happens to be the day before my birthday.

#17

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The new Book Sense bestseller list is up, and Bad Monkeys has jumped seventeen spots from last week. So depending on whether this is an arithmetic or geometric progression, next week it should be either #0 or #8½. I’m not sure which possibility would be cooler. Probably #0, since that implies, in my fevered imagination at least, infinite sales.

(As an aside, I recently discovered that you cannot use a pound sign in a MySpace blog entry. Strange.)

Bad Monkeys is #34…

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…on this week’s Book Sense extended bestseller list. Not bad for an opening weekend.

In other good news (we hope), the New York Times Book Review is going to review Bad Monkeys on August 26th. And the Washington Post Book World review is scheduled for next Wednesday. Woot!