Getting Social Networking Tips from Gary Vaynerchuk and Joe Sorge, Plus This Week's Bestsellers

After a wonderful event on Saturday with Bradley Beaulieu (pronounced "bowl-yer", I learned), I went home to finish reading The Thank You Economy.  Having learned that I had stopped just before the section on Joe Sorge and A.J. Bombers, I now understood why there is a tweet up on Tuesday afternoon at 2:30 with Sorge, before Tuesday's (4/26) event at 7 pm. And of course you know that you need to register for this event. Keep track of our upcoming events here.

After finishing Vaynerchuk's book, where small businesses are taught to think big and big corporations learn to act small, I dug right into Sorge's #TwitterWorks, which he wrote with Streetza Pizza's Scott Baitinger and local social media expert Phil Gerbyshak.  Alas, I still get the feeling that I have been handed a scroll written in ancient Greek whenever I get near Twitter, but one day perhaps...

I've learned a lot, such as that important detail that when someone follows you, you're supposed to follow them back in order to communicate by DM (direct message).  And the interesting thing is, no matter how you feel about Twitter, you will find my combination of interest and incompetence rather sad.

So let's switch gears and look at this week's bestsellers, starting with hardcover fiction:

1. The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace

2. The Troubled Man, by Henning Mankell

3. The Land of Painted Caves, by Jean Auel

4. A Lesson in Secrets, by Jacqueline Winspear

5. Room, by Emma Donoghue
Has Winspear been going top five on the New York Times bestseller list for a long time?  Decades ago, I contemplated tracking book bestsellers so you could access success in book form, a la the old Joel Whitburn music books.  I wonder if someone is doing this on a website?  It just seems like yesterday that we were handselling Maisie Dobbs from little Soho Press.

Nonfiction hardcovers:

1. Salad as a Meal, by Patricia Wells

2. Grant Wood, by Tripp Evans

3. Bossypants, by Tina Fey
4. Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand
5. Malcolm X, by Manning Marable
To give you a handle on our Tina Fey sales, they are more than double our #1 hardcover title, and this should go at least another two weeks as hip mamas get Bossypants instead of flowers and candy.

Paperback fiction:

1. The Winds of Khalakovo, by Bradley Beaulieu

2. A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer winner
3. The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer

4. Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese

5. The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano

This week I had a nice email conversation with Giordano's American editor, Pamela Dorman. It's going on our spring book club brochure.

1. Children's Books, exlucing sales that are solely bulk school orders

1. Little White Rabbit, by Kevin Henkes

2. Mockingbird, by Kathryn Erskine

3. Moon over Manifest, by Clare Vanderpool
4. The Hunger Games, by Suzane Collins

5. Home for a Bunny, by Margaret Wise Brown

It's always nice to see that bunnies really own Easter.  We tried giving chicks their due this year, with mixed success.