As one a rather distinctive vocal artist from the previous century once crooned, “Two out of three ain’t bad.”
I may have gotten a tad caught up in Grishamania in my post yesterday morning., when I said that I expected “at least a half dozen” Grisham books to be in the Kindle Store’s top 50 bestsellers by the end of the day (the first day on which they were available for the Kindle). The closest any of them came was his most recent book, a collection of stories called Ford County, which is #72 after 24 hours. I also forecast that Grisham would dominate the Kindle Movers & Shakers list
But I will say that, on a very significant matter that is only tangentially related to the launch of the Grisham oeuvre on the Kindle, things may not be going precisely as we Kindelophiles and advocates of the $9.99 bestseller/new-release price ceiling might wish. I am seeing increasing evidence that might cause the big publishers to justify their mid-teens pricing for ebooks. The evidence — like much of what we find when we move from the ideological to the empirical — does not all cut one way, and I will post on what I am seeing later today.
Meanwhile, Grisham and his 23 new Kindle books are doing just fine this morning. Eleven of the books are in the top 1,000, which subject to check I would guess is better than what any other author is currently experiencing. At the risk of rather obviously dating myself, it kind of reminds me of those crazy days a little further back in the previous century when four lads from Liverpool had something like 117 of the top 100 songs on the Billboard charts. Here’s a snapshot of how the 23 Grishams are doing among the 464,751 current book titles in the U.S. Kindle Store:
TITLE KINDLE KINDLE STORE SALES RANK
PRICE AS OF 5 am 3.17.10
Ford County 9.99 72
The Associate 9.99 212
The Firm 7.99 316
A Time to Kill 7.99 435
The Partner 5.99 442
The Testament 7.99 504
The Appeal 7.99 525
The Innocent Man 7.99 564
The Last Juror 7.99 750
The Rainmaker 7.99 795
The Broker 7.99 872
Playing for Pizza 7.99 1,070
The Street Lawyer 7.99 1,130
The Brethren 7.99 1,132
The King of Torts 7.99 1,167
The Pelican Brief 7.99 1,262
The Summons 7.99 1,723
A Painted House 7.99 2,433
The Client 7.99 2,643
Bleachers 7.99 2,698
The Runaway Jury 7.99 3,350
Skipping Christmas 6.99 5,206
The Chamber 7.99 5,810
It’s also interesting to me
- that his top 5 books, sales-wise, are his two newest, his two oldest, and my personal favorite, The Partner;
- that, aside from The Firm and A Time to Kill, most of his books which were made into big movies are in the bottom half of the list sales wise; and
- that the same could be said for the books where he veered away from his “brand” legal thriller formula, although I admire him for the veering and note that most authors would be thrilled to have backlist books doing as well as Bleachers, A Painted House, Playing for Pizza, and Skipping Christmas.
A final postscript: This is just me and a few others who have written in, and not necessarily you, but have I spent any money yet on Grishams for my Kindle? No. If these books were text-to-speech enabled, I’d probably have bought four or five already. With me, it’s not a boycott, just convenience. Beyond what at any given time is on my must-read list, I am much more likely to buy Kindle books if they come with the built-in option of toggling back and forth between reading and listening, to allow me to continue while I am in my car, cooking, or on my way to slumber.