J.K. Rowling's New Novel Posts Huge Sales, No One Surprised
J.K. Rowling's new novel The Casual Vacancy has sold 375,000 copies in its first six days on the market.
Granted, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold 8.3 million copies in its first day. So not as good, but still not bad. Not bad at all.
Here's some more data, from The Hollywood Reporter:
The Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy sold about three million copies its first month in print (it started as an eBook only).
No Easy Day, the memoir by a former SEAL about the killing of Osama Bin Laden, which had the biggest debut of the year to date, sold 254,000 copies according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about three-quarters of all U.S. print book sales.
Rowling's book recorded 157,000 sales through Nielsen's tracking, suggesting print and eBooks are selling at about a 1:1 ratio.
Reviews have been mixed. The New York Times said that Rowling's real-world story was "so willfully banal, so depressingly clichéd that The Casual Vacancy is not only disappointing — it’s dull." But the Wall Street Journal said that, after "events begin to unfurl, it becomes a positively propulsive read."
Have you read it yet? What do you think?
News by Rob W. Hart
Rob W. Hart is the class director at LitReactor, as well as the associate publisher for MysteriousPress.com. He's the author of The Last Safe Place: A Zombie Novella, and his short stories have appeared in Shotgun Honey, Thuglit, Crime Factory, and Needle: A Magazine of Noir. He lives in New York City, and you can find his website at www.robwhart.com.
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I haven't read it (didn't read the Potters either - life is too short), but Eve, the other Sluttylemon, has. She's a huge Rowling fan - she-who-can-do-no-wrong etc - but even so admits on the latest Sluttylemon podcast that the book is a struggle to get into. Characters dislikeable, distinct lack of a plot, infelicitous writing and so on.
On the bright side, there's lots of swearing. That did pique my interest slightly, but not enough to buy it.
Whole discussion here.
@Cath Murphy: life is only too short to read HP if you die before you learn to read.