Book Buzz From USA TODAY
By Press Release - Jun 15 , 2009
McLEAN, VA – Here’s the latest book buzz from USA TODAY with a sneak peek at the highlights of tomorrow’s Best-Selling Books list:
More vampires on the list: In 1993 — long before Stephenie Meyer’s Bella Swann or Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse — sexy, strong-willed vampire hunter Anita Blake starred in Laurell K. Hamilton’s “Guilty Pleasures”. This week, “Skin Trade,” her 17th Anita Blake tale debuts at No. 6 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list. Reached at her home outside St. Louis, Hamilton, 46, has no plans to stop writing about Blake. “I’m still having a great time playing with my imaginary friends,” she says. She attributes the paranormal fiction craze to a desire to escape. “The higher the stress, the more people want to read about the fantastic,” she says. Next summer, 2010, Anita Blake will appear in an original TV movie.
Beyond the Grave, by Jude Watson, book four in The 39 Clues, a multi-media mystery/adventure series for kids, lands on the list at No. 11. That’s the highest debut for a series that began at No. 16 in 2008 with The Maze of Bones by Rick Riordan, who outlined nine other books for other authors. Gordon Korman’s One False Note (2008) reached No. 31 and Peter Lerangis’s The Sword Thief (2009) was No. 16. Watson is the pen name of Judy Blundell, who won a National Book Award for her teen novel, What I Saw and How I Lied. Scholastic reports 3 million copies of the series in print and 500,000 registered users for its online game. Editor David Levithan says, “a lot of classrooms and library reading groups are logging in together and discussing the clues as a team, so the stats are probably even higher.”
For all the news from this week’s Best-Selling Books list, see Thursday’s editions of USA TODAY for the top 50 books or log onto www.top150.usatoday.com for the complete list of 150 best-selling books from last week.
USA TODAY’s list differs from other lists because the rankings are based solely on retail sales data from major chain and independent bookstores across the USA. Included are more than one million volumes from approximately 3,000 large-inventory, diverse-content bookstores. USA TODAY’s list shows readers what is selling across the whole range of books, not just what is selling by category. Hardcover, paperback, fiction and non-fiction are pooled together. USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list has been published each Thursday in the newspaper’s Life section since October 28, 1993.
USA TODAY was founded in 1982 with a mission to serve as a forum for better understanding and unity to help make the USA truly one nation. Through its flagship newspaper and popular Web site, USA TODAY engages the national conversation and connects readers online through social media applications. USA TODAY, the nation’s top-selling newspaper with a total average daily circulation of more than 2.1 million, and USATODAY.com, an award-winning newspaper Web site which launched in 1995, reach a combined 5.8 million readers daily. The USA TODAY news and information brand also includes: USA TODAY Education, USA TODAY LIVE, USA TODAY Mobile, Open Air magazine and USATODAY Sports Weekly. USA TODAY is owned by Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI).
