Our Seasonal Top 25, A Work That's Always in Progress...

I love bestseller lists and so do customers. We tabulate a bestseller list every week, and even feature it in the blog every Sunday.  That said, the idea of changing around our weekly bestsellers every week exhausts me, and the case we have available would not work very well separating out adult and kids books, hardcover and paperback, fiction and nonfiction.

Instead, we've taken to doing a quarterly (more or less) top 25 pretty much regularly, though occasionally I use the case for something else, like our recs for Day for Night last year. It's a tricky thing, because the list is quite event heavy, yet there is some inclination to discount (not price them lower, but rank them lower) the event books, particularly the ones where we sold very little (or sometimes nothing) outside the event.

With Jocelyn having gone east, the task of putting together the list and the shelf talkers (see the work in progress, as well as the finished display) has fallen to Jason. He's very happy about the list and so am I.

The bestseller case is a strange, narrow, pillar surrounding affair.  It's just off our power aisle. And this is just about the right amount of space allotted to such a list. You know who has too much space allotted to bestseller lists? The New York Times bestseller list, that's who.  It's up to six pages of editorial devoted to numbers. Ebooks, print books, ebooks and print books mixed together...yikes. I think I whined about this before, but it really bugs me that there could be two or three more books being reviewed each week.

Oh well, no use crying over things I can't change. Here's our featured 25:
1. The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides
2. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
3. Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff
4. The Unwanteds, by Lisa McMann
5. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
6. Going Home, by Jon Katz
7. A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
8. Floors, by Patrick Carman
9. American Boy, by Larry Watson
10. The Hare with Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal

11. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
12. Liesl & Po, by Lauren Oliver
13. 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami
14. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
15. The All of It, by Jeannette Haien
16. Write-a-thon, by Rochelle Melander
17. In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson
18. The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain
19. Paris without End, by Gioia Diliberto
20. Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
21. Room, by Emma Donoghue
22. Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
23. On Canaan's Side, by Sebastian Barry
24. Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay
25. The Hangman's Daughter, by Oliver Potsch

So fitting that Harbach and Eugenides are next to each other. They even look a bit like twins. What about Paris Wife and Paris Without End being neck and neck?  Interesting, huh?

And oh those shelf talkers.  Pretty schmancy, huh?