#Publisher's Weekly

[formerlibrarian]

Back when I was a Librarian, we lived and breathed by the Publisher's Weekly Bestseller List. It was my responsibility to print or photocopy the list every week and update our bestseller's display. (Also to purchase extra copies of particularly popular bestsellers.)

I haven't looked at the list in YEARS. Some of these surprise me:

A new translation of The Iliad made the list?!

Ken Follett is still alive?? (I looked him up, he's only 74.)

Danielle Steel is still alive?? ( I just looked her up, she's only 76 and has been married five(!) times. To be fair, I also looked up Ken Follett, he's only been married twice.)

I see some Christmas-themed books on the list!

I see a Disney manga! (“The Battle for Pumpkin King”)

PUBLISHER WEEKLY’S BESTSELLERS LIST: October 5, 2023

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. “Fourth Wing” by Rebecca Yarros (Red Tower)

2. “The Running Grave” by Robert Galbraith (Muholland)

3. “The Armor of Light” by Ken Follett (Viking)

4. “Holly” by Stephen King (Scribner)

5. “12 Months to Live” by Patterson/Lupica (Little, Brown)

6. “Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett (Harper)

7. “The Fragile Threads of Power” by V.E. Schwab (Tor)

8. “Bright Lights, Big Christmas” by Mary Kay Andrews (St Martin’s Press)

9. “The Iliad” by Homer/Wilson (Norton)

10. “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

11. “Vince Flynn: Code Red” by Kyle Mills (Atria)

12. “The Covenant of Water” by Abraham Verghese (Grove)

13. “The Last Devil to Die” by Richard Osman (Viking/Dorman)

14. “Tom Clancy: Weapons Grade” by Don Bentley (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

15. “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride (Riverhead)

_____

HARDCOVER NON-FICTION

1. “Enough” by Cassidy Hutchinson (Simon &Schuster)

2. “Killing the Witches” by O’Reilly/Dugard (St. Martin’s Press)

3. “The Democrat Party Hates America” by Mark R. Levin (Threshold)

4. “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster)

5. “Democracy Awakening” by Heather Cox Richardson (Viking)

6. “Government Gangsters” by Kash Pramod Patel (Post Hill)

7. “Failure Is Not as Option” by Patrick Hinds (BenBella Books)

8. “Thicker Than Water” by Kerry Washington (Little, Brown Spark)

9. “Astor” by Cooper/Howe (Harper)

10. “Build the Life You Want” by Brooks/Winfrey (Portfolio)

11. “Skinnytaste Simple” by Homolka/Jones (Clarkson Potter)

12. “Counting the Cost” by Jill Duggar (Gallery)

13. “The Creative Act” by Rick Rubin (Penguin Press)

14. “Outlive” by Peter Attia (Harmony)

15. “Fast Like a Girl” by Mindy Pelz (Hay House)

_____

MASS MARKET BESTSELLERS

1. “Undercover Operation” by Maggie K. Black (Love Inspired Suspense)

2. “Bad Luck Vampire” by Lynsay Sands (Avon)

3. “Seeking Justice” by Sharee Stover (Love Inspired Suspense)

4. “The Teacher’s Christmas Secret” by Emma Miller (Love Inspired)

5. “Rescuing the Stolen Child” by Connie Queen (Love Inspired Suspense)

6. “Tracked Through the Woods” by Laura Scott (Love Inspired Suspense)

7. “The Boys from Biloxi” by John Grisham (Vintage)

8. “Christmas Murder Cover-Up” by Shannon Redmon (Love Inspired Suspense)

9. “Pursuit at Panther Point” by Cindi Myers (Harlequin Intrigue)

10. “The Whittiers” by Danielle Steel (Dell)

11. “Trusting Her Amish Rival” by Jackie Stef (Love Inspired)

12. “Texas Scandal” by Barb Han (Harlequin Intrigue)

13. “Marked for Revenge” by Delores Fossen (Harlequin Intrigue)

14. “Hunted at Christmas” by Dana R. Lynn (Love Inspired Suspense)

15. “A Companion for Christmas” by Lee Tobin McClain (Love Inspired)

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TRADE PAPERBACK BESTSELLERS

1. “House of Sky and Breath” by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury)

2. “Things We Left Behind” by Lucy Score (Bloom)

3. “The Shadow Work Journal” by Keila Shaheen (Keila Shaheen)

4. “The Battle for Pumpkin King” by Dan Conner et al. (Disney Manga)

5. “Icebreaker” by Hannah Grace (Atria)

6. “Too Late” by Colleen Hoover (Grand Central Publishing)

7. “23 1/2 Lies” by James Patterson (Grand Central Publishing)

8. “It Starts with Us” by Colleen Hoover (Atria)

9. “Mad Honey” by Picoult/Boylan (Ballantine)

10. “Twisted Love” by Ana Huang (Bloom)

11. “Assistant to the Villain” by Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Red Tower)

12. “The Housemaid’s Secret” by Freida McFadden (Mobius)

13. “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig (Penguin Books)

14. “The Husky and His White Cat Shizun, Vol. 3” by Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou (Seven Seas)

15. “Dreamland” by Nicholas Sparks (Bantam Dell)

[my-little-kraken]

Used to love Walter Farley stallion books. Vintage Publisher's' Weekly Aug 1948 Fall Children's Book edition. This has a nice ad for Island Stallion.

[renstrapp]

NO FREAKING WAYYYYY "Strapp is a confident cartoonist" WHAT! ME?? :D ty publishers weekly!!!

link to the review <3 How Could You comes out in two weeks on Dec 17!!!

[taylor-titmouse]

Coming in late on this one, but if you're saying you're not planning on your work being piblished... but isnt there a graphic novel coming out soon? There was a link to pre-order it at least via bookshop or barnes and noble (can't remember which off the top of my head). Were you able to get your blook distributed to them as a self-piblished creator? Or was the graphic novel trad-pub and you're just saying you can't see your prose writing/books getting published?

what a funny thing to gotcha me on

yes, i do have a traditionally published graphic novel coming out. under a different name. in a different genre. for a different audience. it's not relevant for me to bring it up every time somebody asks me here if my work will ever be physically printed because it's not the work they're asking about.

so yeah. the last thing you said.

[backfliips]

At work my bosses keep bringing up a position I really really want but im not qualified for it and their bosses definitely won't greenlight me for the position so whenever they bring up me being a media specialist I just look at them like this

[nemo-writes]

i'm actually thinking of finally posting this big series i've been working on for the past year or so. i'm lowkey scared it won't be as popular as dance macabre....but honestly? i just need to get it off my chest and out there!

[julianplum]

The absolute weirdest thing about working on picture books (which is my main job, actually!!) is that I am making more art right now than I've ever made in my life and I can't put it anywhere or share it at all!

Which is, on the one hand, frustrating! As an artist on the internet, content output is sort of your lifeblood, and when I post new work, I notably get more traffic to my shop, which is great because making art is the only way I earn money.

On the other hand there's the thing of: art shouldn't be "content output," and there's no inherent worth difference to work shared now vs. later, and I shouldn't be prioritizing my output to match some social media algorithm or some notion I have in my head of what an "active artist" looks like. I'm a working artist, which is a different thing, I think??

The amount of work tee'd up for me this year also means that I'll have to put making new prints and stickers on the backburner for the first time since I started doing this full-time! Again, frustrating because I have a million ideas (snesbians......) and sort of a relief because it means I can step away and come back with only the best ideas having floated to the top. I hope!!

long post, ig, but I have many evolving thoughts and haven't reworked my newsletter enough / decided on a new home for it yet so they end up here. thanks for sticking with me in the secret work period, fam. I promise it'll be worth it when there are shiny books on the other side.

[richardarmitagefanpage]

According to Publishers Weekly, Richard will attend "Audible landscape: What’s Next for Audio, Building Audience, and Creating Breakout Authors" at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2024 on October 16, 2024.

[prettyboykatsuki]

would anyone be interested in potentially being a becoming a beta reader for me for a very long prince todoroki fic 😭

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

you know . i keep saying that i’m gonna make a post abt chapter 268 and i probably will as soon as i can get my thoughts in order but ………. i’ve been thinking a lot about the conclusion to sukuna’s and yuji’s relationship . and even though i wish we had more buildup beforehand i do think the ending itself is really really good…. even if sukuna is technically yuji’s uncle, yuji’s soul still represents the soul of the younger brother sukuna ate in the womb, so for yuji to accept sukuna, to not curse him at the very last moment…. it feels very . intentional. like the younger brother is forgiving the older brother for doing what he had to do to survive. sukuna rejects the forgiveness, which makes sense, but i wonder if he felt that way too…. that he was being pitied, forgiven, and loved by the first weakling he devoured……..

idk. they make me insane though

[riacte]

I feel like I learned a lot about storytelling + "marketing" a story from Webtoon (the Webtoon from a few years ago when it was still decent). The way it worked was that 1) story blurb to draw in people 2) three initial episodes to get people invested 3) one episode per week. It showed the strength of a strong summary with a genre but without trope tags (unlike fanfiction) or describing your work as abc meets xyz (which seems to be what YA publishing does nowadays?). The three initial episodes introduces tone, artstyle, main characters, main plot, basic worldbuilding, and is supposed to quickly "hook" the reader. I like the format of three initial episodes (instead of one) because the first episode is usually different (given its main purpose is to grab the attention of new people), the other two gives you a taste of what a "standard weekly update" might contain.

I feel a lot of Webtoons start with a strong premise/ gimmick/ hook but they don't know what to do with it. And that's totally normal because some premises are better when shrouded in mystery and you have to do the hard work of explaining the mystery. I've read Webtoons that start with one premise, then it gets sidelined in the middle as new themes develop, and in the end you realise the "premise" was a marketing tactic to draw people in and the story is about something else entirely, but you stayed because it was still a good story, and you have no complaints. (Eg. I think people step into I Love Yoo thinking it's a romance, and the first bits do seem like a set up for romance, but it turns out the genre is drama and the romance is a slooooooow burn.) I've read Webtoons that start with one interesting premise, then it fizzles away and turns into a rather standard story for its genre to the point the hook is barely relevant when it was what made it stand out. And on the rare occasion you will find a Webtoon that has its premise, develops the plot from there, sticks with its themes, and the ending is thematically resonant. (I think Cursed Princess Club does a good job at this.) But it's difficult to craft a very consistent and coherent story (especially given the serial format), so it's fine to just kinda sideline or even ditch your premise so long the actual main plot is solid. Your premise is what initially got people reading, but they'll get invested in other things. Maybe you even have to manually create a hook and get into the meat later once your readers are properly invested. But I feel most of the time it's otherwise because you can get a really cool idea but NO CLUE on how to end it and it sucks because either you drag on or give it an unsatisfactory ending. The good thing is that you get a "buffer zone" in which readers are still interested in reading due to the premise/hook and you get the time to properly work things out.

So I don't think a premise has to be completely executed and explained in order for a story to be compelling. If it does its job of bringing in new folks and convincing them to stay long enough to get invested in style/tone/plot/characters/relationships/whatever, sometimes it's easier to let the premise go. Sometimes you want a tonal shift. But at the same time, a premise is so useful for marketing purposes. You can talk about what tropes it has and what media it's influenced by, but what is the story actually about?

[retracexcviii]

Sunday Moon

Hello there once more dear fellows and Luna lovers, a wild Sunday moon appeared.

Don't edit this drawing and don't post it anywhere.

I told you that when I have some more posts to come back I would, but this isn't the return of Luna.

The artist is @/wa.bbitx on Instagram.

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.

.

Do you remember in November when I said I was excited with a commission in particular because I was lucky to take a slot of this artist? Well, I finally received it this week XD

And since this was something I was supposed to post while doing the weekly Luna post (and since I really love it), I bring back the Sunday Moon just for it.

[renstrapp]

Thank u Publishers Weekly!! I'm officially "confident" and a "cartoonist" as well. How Could You comes out in just two weeks!!

[sarahreesbrennan]

Publishers Weekly Review LONG LIVE EVIL

Today the print edition of Publishers’ Weekly is out and with it their kind review of LONG LIVE EVIL. Delighted to hear I hook readers from the first page and that my adult debut is spellbinding. Long Live Evil INDEED. 😈 More detail below… ‘Brennan (In Other Lands) hooks readers from page one of her spellbinding adult debut. Rae, who has cancer, delights in having her sister Alice read from their favorite fantasy series, Time of Iron, in her hospital bed. One night, she meets a mysterious woman who offers her a cure. All Rae has to do to be cancer-free is enter the books and pluck the Flower of Life and Death. But if she fails, she’ll die in her earthly body and wind up trapped in the story forever. Rae takes the deal and is transported into Time of Iron—in the role of villainess Rahela Domitia. Arriving in medias res, she must evade execution or risk dying in both worlds. Brennan has a lot of infectious fun with her meta conceit, and as Rae interferes with the plot she knows so well, the stakes ratchet up and the story takes some unexpected turns. Readers won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough.’

[inamagicalhallucination]

i dont think bsd is poorly written at all