One of the titles on the EarlyWord Watch List (i.e., titles we think might take off) is Ballantine’s big fiction debut of the season, Juliet by Anne Fortier. Reviews have been mixed, but even those that are generally negative end up calling it “fun,” as exhibited in the most recent, in the Washington Post Book World by Diana Gabaldon,

On the whole, the story is fun, if silly, and engaging in spots. Its modern-day characters are mostly cardboard, though

The “fun” part is clearly connecting with readers; it arrives on the 9/12  NYT fiction best seller list at # 14.

Gabaldon says this about its appeal,

The strongest point of the book is the flavorful, evocative descriptions of Siena, with its ancient neighborhoods, rivalries and family feuds, and the annual running of the Palio horse race. The Shakespearean scholarship on display is both impressive and well-handled, too, with the original Romeo and Juliet story doled out in exciting installments between Julie’s increasingly convoluted but much less interesting story.

The book will be receiving more attention, including an interview with Liane Hansen on NPR’s Weekend Edition, scheduled to run 9/12.

Juliet Anne Fortier Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 464 pages Publisher: Ballantine Books – (2010-08-24) ISBN / EAN: 0345516109 / 9780345516107

RH Audio; UNABR; 9780739384954; $40
Random House Large Print, 9780739377994; pbk; $25

Back in 2008, when EarlyWord was in its infancy, we ran this photo from a BEA ’08 booth display. It was for a book that was the first in a planned trilogy, coming out in the fall with big hopes and an announced 100,000 copy print run (doubled after the reactions at BEA). There was lots of buzz on librarian blogs, but at that point it hadn’t been reviewed and only two of the fifteen large libraries we checked had it on order. It went on to debut on best seller lists in its first week on sale.

And now, the final title in the trilogy, Mockingjay, has a total of 1.6 million copies in print since its release on August 24 (see Scholastic’s press release). A movie based on Hunger Games is scheduled to begin production early next year.

(Thanks to Angelina Benedetti, King County, WA, PL for supplying us with that photo, way back when. And, congrats, Cindy, for spotting a winner).

Sir Isaac Newton believed that the universe could not have come out of chaos; it had to be designed by God. In his new book, The Grand Design, physicist Stephen Hawking says, “The Universe can and will create itself from nothing.”

The book, which doesn’t release until next week, is already being blasted by religious leaders after the Times of London wrote about it (the paper will publish an excerpt on Sunday).

The Grand Design Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow Retail Price: $28.00 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Bantam – (2010-09-07) ISBN / EAN: 0553805371 / 9780553805376

Today’s news is all over the release of Tony Blair’s book; interviews with him were aired on NPR’s Morning Edition as well as Good Morning America.

The L.A. Times reviewer finds Blair unusually frank. He gets kudos for writing the book himself, because “…a professional collaborator almost certainly would have manicured [that frankness] away, along with anecdotes that are unintentionally self-revealing.” The book’s simultaneous publication in the U.S. and the U.K. indicates Blair’s “…desire to be regarded as a transatlantic figure,” but, since the memoir is “…first and foremost a political biography, long stretches of it are likely to be terra incognita to most American readers.”

For a British take on the book, see the analysis by several writers for the Guardian (sex “throbs throughout many chapters of the book”).

As the AP reports in the story below, the book is causing a sensation in Britain and was #1 on Amazon UK, at the time the story aired, but it hadn’t cracked the top 100 on Amazon U.S. It has moved up since and is now at #12. Holds in libraries are still light.

Craig Ferguson satirizes our current obsession with electronic gadgets in the intro. to his interview with Laura Lippman on The Late Late Show.

Lippman, a librarian’s daughter, is showing her support for libraries by running a why-I-love-my-library essay contest; the winner will get a visit from Lippman to his or her favorite library (deadline, 9/30/10). Rules are on Lippman’s web site.

I’d Know You Anywhere: A Novel Laura Lippman Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 384 pages Publisher: William Morrow – (2010-08-17) ISBN / EAN: 0061706558 / 9780061706554

• CD available from HarperAudio 09/01/2010: $39.99; ISBN 9780061988486
• Larger Print from Harperluxe  09/01/2010: $25.99; ISBN 978006197922

The best-selling historical adventure story about a grueling 1815 desert trek, Skeletons on the Zahara, by Dean King (Little, Brown, 2004), is being adapted as a screenplay, according to the movie news site, Deadline.

Don’t hold your breath, however, Deadline also notes that the screen writer, Ronan Bennett, has many other projects on his plate.

Consider it her parting gift to the book business; in the final season of her show, Oprah is bringing back the Book Club. Macmillan has alerted accounts that the announcement will be made on Sept. 17th, which is also the book’s on sale date (that’s the date for the edition with the official sticker; the book might have already been published, according to the bookseller Newtonville Books Community blog).

And, guess what literary darling is published by one of Macmillan’s companies? Freedom by Jonathan Franzen is published by FSG. Would Oprah be willing to revisit the author who dissed her in the past, causing her to revoke his invitation to appear on the show? It might make for an interesting segment on forgiveness.

The price fits; Oprah #64 is $28 and so is the Franzen. However, the fake ISBN indicates Oprah’s selection is a St. Martin’s Press title. The price is puzzling, though; it doesn’t fit any titles in St. Martin’s catalog. My guess is that they would be more likely to fudge the price than the ISBN. So, ignoring the price question, here are a couple of titles that might be possibilities:

Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel Ntozake Shange, Ifa Bayeza Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 576 pages Publisher: St. Martin’s Press – (2010-09-14) ISBN / EAN: 031219899X / 9780312198992

Ntozake Shange wrote the award-winning 1975 play,  for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, which Tyler Perry just finished directing as a film. Originally announced for Martin Luther King Day weekend release, it was just moved to November and is getting Oscar buzz. Perry and Oprah are friends and were co-executive producers of the movie Precious.

…………………………

A Secret Kept Tatiana de Rosnay Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: St. Martin’s Press – (2010-09-14) ISBN / EAN: 0312593317 / 9780312593315

The follow up to de Rosnay’s best-selling Sarah’s Key is, according to Kirkus, about “the crushing cost of keeping secrets,” a recurring theme on Oprah’s show.

Carolyn Kellogg examines whether a book’s popularity translates to box office success on the LA Times Jacket Copy blog, in response to Deadline‘s Mike Fleming’s post theorizing that the success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy bodes well for the English-language film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Kellogg says not so fast; the movie Eat Pray Love suggests differently. This enormous hit as a book translated into a merely “satisfactory” movie at the box office, despite a strong opening weekend. Kellogg concludes that this lack of success proves movies can never fulfill readers’ expectations (she doesn’t take into account the success of the Twilight series in both book and movie form, however).

Relativity Media, the company behind the film based on Nicholas Sparks’ forthcoming book, Safe Haven (Grand Central, 9/14) clearly disagrees. They are sinking money into promoting the book a full year before the movie’s release (perhaps nobody told them that Sparks is already a best-selling author).

But can movies rely on a book’s devoted fans? A look at the numbers shows that a film requires a much larger audience than a book to become a success. According to Gilbert’s web site, Eat, Pray, Love has 7 million copies in print after four years, making it a blockbuster. On the other hand, the movie has sold nearly 8 million tickets in just two and a half weeks, rendering it merely satisfactory. (Ticket sales arrived at by dividing the movie’s gross by average ticket price, as reported by TheNumbers.com)

Title recognition may help in marketing a movie based on a best-selling book, but the movie must connect with audiences on its own to succeed.

The more important question for the book business is the reverse; how a movie affects book sales. The tie-in of Eat, Pray, Love hit lists shortly after its release and quickly became the top-selling book in the country well before the movie arrived. In 2008, the tie-in edition of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road became a best seller even without the movie it tied in to, which ended up being delayed for over a year.

In both cases, it was not the quality of the movie that sent people to the book. We probably don’t have to look very deeply for motivation; buyers may simply respond to a familiar title reappearing front of store with a brand new jacket featuring Hollywood stars, regardless of whether they see the movie.

Note: The issue is different for comics and movies, as Robin Brenner explored in an earlier post on EarlyWord (Comics to Film: Who Boosts Whom?).

One of the titles on our Watch List for this week, Skippy Dies, arrives in the US after being a hit in Britain. It receives a warm welcome from the Washington Post, which says,

If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it’s nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book. Recently named to the Man Booker Prize long list, Skippy Dies is an epic crafted around, of all things, a pack of 14-year-old boys.

It’s also received an A from Entertainment Weekly, (which only granted Franzen’s Great American Novel, Freedom an A-) and 3.5 of a possible 4 stars in the 9/13 issue of People.

Although it sounds like an unlikely premise for a movie, it is currently being adapted by Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), who is also planning to direct.

Skippy Dies: A Novel Paul Murray Retail Price: $28.00 Hardcover: 672 pages Publisher: Faber & Faber – (2010-08-31) ISBN / EAN: 0865479437 / 9780865479432

According to the cliché, you’ll know you’ve mastered a language when you begin dreaming in it. Deborah Fallows tells NPR’s All Things Considered that, despite years of study, Chinese Mandarin only entered her dreams in the form of “dictionary dreams,” where she desperately tried to find the words she needed.

In her book, Dreaming in Chinese, Fallows tells the story of moving to Shanghai to live with her husband. Despite how difficult it was to learn, it was the language that helped her begin to understand Chinese culture.

As a result of the interview, the book rose to #120 on Amazon sales rankings, from a lowly #44,298 yesterday.

The book wasn’t reviewed prepub, but it is reviewed in the September issue of O, The Oprah Magazine and in National Geographic Traveler.

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love, And Language Deborah Fallows Retail Price: $22.00 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Walker & Company – (2010-08-31) ISBN / EAN: 0802779131 / 9780802779137

We can’t help but cringe at the title of a new book that criticizes current treatments for prostate cancer; Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers.

It’s been rising on Amazons sales rankings (currently at #207, from #28,021 yesterday), based on coverage in the New York Times Well Column on Monday. The book’s authors point out that only 1 man in 48 is saved by prostate surgery; the others would be better off if it was treated as a chronic condition.

The NYT columnist finds the book’s arguments persuasive, even though he happens to be one of the 48 who was saved by surgery, which uncovered the fact that his cancer was more advanced than his doctors had originally thought.

Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers: No More Unnecessary Biopsies, Radical Treatment or Loss of Sexual Potency Mark Scholz M.D., Ralph Blum Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Other Press – (2010-08-24) ISBN / EAN: 1590513428 / 9781590513422