News
WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 7
‘Crawdads’ Tops One Million Print Sales
Feature: Self-Help Books
Issue: Oct. 14 Deadline: Aug. 14
Needed: Information on trends in the self-help category.
Pub. dates: October 2019 through summer 2020. New releases only,
please; no reprints. Please email pitches to features@publishersweekly.
com by August 14 and put “Call for Info: Self-Help” in the subject line.
Call for
Information
New
England
7% Middle
Atlantic
11%
East North
Central
13%
West
North
Central
8%
East South
Central
6%
West
South
Central 9%
Mountain
8%
Pacific
14%
South
Atlantic
24%
D
elia Owens’s Where the
Crawdads Sing surpassed
one million print copies
sold in 2019, making it the feel-
good publishing story of the year.
The debut novel, preempted by
Putnam’s Tara Singh Carlson in
December 2017 and published by
the Penguin Random House
imprint in August 2018, is the rare
adult fiction novel to sell more
than one million print copies in a
year. In 2018, for instance, the
top-selling adult novel was The
President Is Missing by James
Patterson and Bill Clinton, which
sold more than 703,000 print
units at outlets that report to NPD
BookScan. In 2017, Origin by Dan Brown sold more print
copies (almost 747,000) than any other adult novel. The
success of Crawdads is also notable because it was written
by a debut author, not a big name such as Patterson or Brown.
Crawdads, which is set in 1950s North Carolina and melds
a coming-of-age tale with a romance and a mystery, got off to
a respectable start. After its August 2018 release, it sold
186,000 print copies through December 30 of last year. The
book really took off, though, in the week ended March 23,
when it sold more than 75,000 copies. Since that time, print
sales have ranged from about 38,000 to 49,000 copies per
week (it sold 49,000 copies in the week ended July 20). Since
the beginning of this year, Crawdads has been the #1 overall
print bestseller on BookScan for eight weeks and the #1 adult
fiction title for 22 weeks.
So what made the novel click? Popular wisdom has credited
much of Crawdads’ success to Reese Witherspoon’s Book
Club, which selected the title as its September 2018 pick.
From there, strong word-of-mouth has helped push the book,
which has been celebrated for its lush descriptions of the
natural world, into the sales stratosphere. (Sources close to
the publisher have also noted that,
though print sales for the title are
huge, e-book and audio sales,
which BookScan does not track,
are even bigger.)
Given Crawdads’ setting, it’s not
surprising that it has performed
particularly well in the South,
which has accounted for 39% of
its print sales this year. The book
has done the best in what
BookScan calls the South Atlantic
region (Delaware; Florida;
Georgia; Maryland; North
Carolina; South Carolina; Virginia;
Washington, D.C.; and West
Virginia), which accounted for 24%
of the novel’s print sales this year.
Angel Schroeder, owner of Sunrise Books in High Point, N.C.,
said she had initially been cool to the title, based on its syn-
opsis. But once she read it, she said, she loved it. “The strong
female protagonist is very well drawn, she’s not an angel,
which makes the book interesting,” she added.
Crawdads has been one of the bestselling titles at Sunrise
since it opened in 2016, Schroeder said, and it remains a
steady seller. “I have a customer who keeps coming in and
buying it to give away as gifts,” she noted. “It’s one of the $
hardcovers that’s really worth the money.” She predicted that
the store will do very well with the paperback edition whenever
it is released. —Jim Milliot and Rachel Deahl
‘Where the Crawdads Sing’
Sales by Region
SOURCE: NPD BOOKSCAN
noted, he means that he will experiment with a variety of
models, and Clover will be a direct-to-consumer venture,
using crowdsourcing and direct sales to build an audience.
Panelist Liz Frances, a former book designer and founder
of Street Noise Books, is working with new artists to develop
graphic nonfiction and #OwnVoices memoirs from artists
who are from marginalized communities, such as people of
color and LGBTQ artists.
Panelists Sebastian Girner of TKO Studios and Stuart
continued on p. 8