We haven't had an everybody-runs-in-to-buy-a-book release day in some time, but yesterday seemed to be it. First of all there was Haruki Murakami's
1Q84. We sold 18 copies yesterday, which honestly, was more than we used to sell at the rest of the Schwartz branches over the life of one of his novels. We've had 3.5 people read the new novel, moving around one beaten-up manuscript. Everybody loves it, but I don't think I've gotten a quote/review from anyone yet. Sadly, my email is such a mess that I have to double-check on that. It's sort of fine either way--the sale is there either way and the publisher was certainly not going after bookseller quotes on this novel.
Apparently Three Lives and Company did a midnight opening and Word had a read-a-thon. This is what you learn when you read the
Manichi Daily News. Here's the
San Jose (now dubbed Silicon Valley) Mercury News review, calling it a masterpiece.
The other book that's had a sales pop is Walter Isaacson's
Steve Jobs. I guess Simon was pretty inundated with orders, as we didn't receive our Monday laydown books until Tuesday, and at least one of my other bookseller friends confirmed this. We sold 15 the first day, which is also very good for us. I can also say that our pal Wendy at S&S said we'd sell out the first day with our initial order. Fortunately after I mentioned our initial buy, we increased it twice. She's right though--we'll be out of the book shortly.
One of our customers was showing me his new ereader as he bought a copy of Isaacson's book. I'm glad to say we have a good number of folks cross shopping device and physical book. We talked about how we could sell to him via Google Editions. And in this case, he bought the book, which of course made us happy.
Here's a little write up from
The Wall Street Journal about the book. And here's
The New York Times review from Janet Maslin.
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