HAWK Lands on Best Seller List
As we’ve been tracking, H is for Hawk (Grove Press; OverDrive Sample), Helen Macdonald’s memoir has been enjoying remarkable reviews and now, it debuts on the 3/8 NYT Nonfiction list at #8.
We’re a bit surprised, because its official pub date isn’t until next week, but the book actually shipped last month. Gregory Cowles notes in his Inside the List column that Macdonald has been flummoxed by the response the book’s already received in the U.K. (her actual quote, from the Belfast Telegraph is, “That threw me into a massive wobble!”). We can expect it to rise higher on next week’s list, which will reflect the impact from the raves in this week’s People and Entertainment Weekly.
The author responded yesterday to the tweeted news from her publisher:
Blimey! I can’t do cartwheels, so I just did a celebratory forward roll. #happyH
— Helen Macdonald (@HelenJMacdonald)
Arriving at #11 is another memoir that has received media attention, combat photojournalist Lynsey Addario’s It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War (Penguin, Feb. 10; OverDrive Sample).
On the Young Adult list, The DUFF: (Designated Ugly Fat Friend) by Kody Keplinger (Hachette/Poppy) arrives at #2, its first appearance since being published in 2010, as a result of the promotion for a film adaptation, which arrived in theaters last week. A low-budget film (which may be the 
reason the publisher decided to only release the tie-in as an eBook), its “respectable” success is being attributed to an effective social marketing campaign, which may have also driven interest in the book. (View trailer here and see “What Makes The DUFF This Generation’s Mean Girls“)
Further down, at #7 is a standalone eBook short story from Cassandra Clare, Welcome To Shadowhunter Academy, the first in the Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, a series of ten eBooks which will be publised monthly, as announced last fall in Entertainment Weekly‘s “Shelf Life” column. It is available both in eBook ( ISBN 9781481443142) and downloadable audio (ISBN 9781442383937).
In fiction, The Girl on the Train continues to chug along at #1 with no slowdown in sight. Publishers Weekly compares the BookScan numbers to those for another well-known blockbuster and finds “The Girl on the Train has pulled well ahead of where Gone Girl was six weeks in. At that point, Gillian Flynn’s book had sold 116K units total [which is below GOTT‘s more than 230K units], was #3 on the week’s Hardcover Fiction list, and was the #11 book overall.” Holds in libraries we checked for GOTT are continuing at a steady rate of 4:1.