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From Publishers Weekly: Books like Colleen Hoover‘s 2016 novel ‘It Ends with Us’ are blowing up with BookTok influencers—and seeing huge sales spikes that often send titles to the top of the bestseller lists.

In August 2016, Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us was published by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. By the end of its first month on the market, the novel had sold about 21,000 copies at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. The publicity was good—a nine-stop national book tour, blurbs from bestselling authors—but sales flatlined after that initial month. For several years, weekly sales rarely broke triple digits. Then something changed.

Libby McGuire, senior v-p and publisher of Atria, first noticed a sales bump in November 2020. By the summer of 2021, the bump became a surge: since the start of June, weekly sales have averaged about 17,000. McGuire said Atria has gone back to press 24 times since November to keep up with demand. “We are printing as quickly as we can,” she said, “and expect to go back several times through the fall.” The novel has sold more than 308,000 copies since the start of 2021—with sales peaking at just over 29,000 copies in the week ended August 14—and just shy of 450,000 since its 2016 release, according to BookScan.

It Ends with Us has become what Atria’s senior associate director of publicity, Ariele Fredman, called “the book of the summer”—despite the fact that it was published five summers ago. “Sometimes the book of the summer is not always the newest book,” Fredman said, noting that that jump in It Ends with Us sales is a good example of why publishers should maintain their backlist, “because [a book] can pop at any time.”

Read full post on Publishers Weekly