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In Which Our Hero Encounters The New York Times…

Woo hoo! It looks like the hometown kid made good. Making the transition from paperback to hardcover is a bit scary: Will anyone think a Brent Weeks book is worth 25 bones? Well, it seems that some people do. Enough people, in fact, to make the Gray Lady notice.

The Black Prism debuted on The New York Times best seller list at number 23.

Last time, with the mass market paperback, I reached my apogee at number 29, so I’m very pleased. Of course, the printed list only shows up to 15, so if you go hunting my name, you’ll actually need a computer. But hey, look at this, you have a computer right in front of you! Marvelous! See that thingy near your hand? Use it to point HERE.

Last Among Equals

So after being knocked off my perch on the New York Times Extended Best Seller List after a mere two weeks, it looks like I’m…



That’s right. I’m BACK. Yeah, keep scrolling. Further. Further. There I am! At number 35, out of–you guessed it!–35. Needless to say, this isn’t a bad place to be last place. The odd thing I learned is that my sales numbers have been pretty much rock solid over the last month, so my fluctuations up and down and off the list are either because other people on the list have had their sales fluctuate or because of that pencil-neck joke. But hey, I’m not complaining. Getting on the list for even one week is a whole lot more than most writers get. Ever.

So, cheers, New York Times, and if I make it high enough, I promise I’ll buy a print edition. (But $10 for the Sunday paper? Seriously?)

Up 2!

This week, I scrambled up two more spots on the New York Times Extended Best Seller List. I am now perched at #29. Whoo hoo! I also figured out that “best seller” is two words. I’m told it behooves a writer to know how to spell. Compound adjectives confound.

And I got this very cool picture (thanks, Heather H.!) this week, taken at a Borders. Nice folks to rub shoulders with, huh?

In Borders at #9
(Click to enlarge.)

Not an April Fool’s Joke…

it just feels like one.

I have just made the New York Times extended Bestseller List at #31. (Apparently the Gray Lady didn’t resent that “pencil-necked rube” jibe a few posts back.) There are lists and then there are lists. It’s a little byzantine, so I’ll explain what I’ve learned:  The New York Times has bestseller lists for each book format: hardcover, mass market paperback (like mine), and trade paperback (the bigger, more expensive format). They also cover non-fiction and children’s books. Why so many lists? Because there are 172,000 books published every year in the US. And the main list of 15 spots is owned by nice folks named Patterson, Grisham, King, Steele, Picoult, Cussler, Coben, Meyer, and whomever Oprah likes. So in order to add some spice, the NY Times has the extra lists.

This is A Big Deal. Orbit says that according to their official guidelines, I am now “New York Times Bestselling Author Brent Weeks.”

When I graduated from college, I made a bucket list. On it, I believe the first three items were, “Write a novel. Get published. Make the NY Times Bestseller List.” As I got a little older and more mature, I finished the first item and realized how ridiculously improbable the second was, much less the third. My dream became slightly more modest: to just make enough to support my family while doing what I love. So this is surreal. I thought this was the kind of thing you work for a whole career to earn, and I certainly didn’t think I’d hit it with my first book.

I want to thank all of you who forced your friends to read my book. Hitting the bestseller list six months after publication tells me that this isn’t the result of a huge publicity push–not that marketing didn’t have a integral part in this!–but a late peak tells you that people are telling their friends. So you’re responsible for me being able to survive to write more books and live my dream. Thank you. And I want to thank agent Don Maass for taking a chance on me and Devi and everyone at Orbit for working so hard on these books. I also want to thank Borders. They’ve been awesome, and just last week they put up one of those little cardboard stands for me and fellow Orbit author Karen Miller/K.E. Mills. I wouldn’ t have hit the list if they hadn’t. There are supposed to be those stands at every Borders in the country, so I’ll post pictures as soon as I can drive out to my nearest Borders.

Second Place is First Loser?

The term “best-seller” used to mean something.

It meant some pencil-necked rube working for the New York Times liked your book. But these days everybody and his dog has a best-seller list. Some of these people try to actually base their lists on actual books sold. The nerve.

Locus Magazine, the venerable SFF  industry mag, compiles an SFF best-seller list from numbers reported to them by Borders/Walden, B&N/B.Dalton, Bakka-Phoenix, Borderlands, McNally Robinson, Mysterious Galaxy, Pages for All Ages, St. Mark’s, Toadstool, Uncle Hugo’s, and White Dwarf. The latest issue of Locus reports that The Way of Shadows is the #2 best-selling fantasy paperback. Woo hoo! Shadow’s Edge rolled in at a respectable #6. Beyond the Shadows was a conspicuous no-show (the data was from November, before BtS was published, so one hopes that had something to do with it). The online edition isn’t updated yet, but this link is to the previous month’s list.

Not sure how to reconcile the three–could the indies be moving a lot more copies of my books than the big bad Joe Foxes of the world?–but I don’t show up at all on the latest Barnes and Noble/B. Dalton SFF list. And Borders has Charlaine Harris absolutely dominating their list, still. She has SFF paperback spots 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8. I did sneak into the middle of all that southern vampire lovin’ to take spot #5. I thought they said if I wanted my books to sell like mad, “you should show with BO,” so I swore off deodorant immediately.

Have a show with HBO. H B O.