[fjtorres]

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...04e5-304500337

No adult fiction title released in the January-through-June period managed to make the top 20 print bestsellers list in the first half of the year. In the first six months of 2015, two novels released that year, The Girl on the Train and Grey, held the first and third spots, respectively, on the print list and were #1 and #2 on the Amazon Top 20 Kindle E-books List.

Stephen King’s End of Watch, for example, was released late in June and is still likely to put up solid numbers. Even so, End of Watch sold about 75,000 copies in its first week on sale—a good figure, but not close to the 354,0000 copies Grey sold last June, when it first hit bookstore shelves. Since the advent of e-books, gone are the days when franchise authors can regularly post huge opening-week sales of print books. And unlike last year, when Girl on the Train and Grey were both selling well in print and digital, the two lists in 2016 were very different.

Over the first six months in 2016, only three books appeared on both the Amazon top-20 e-book list and the BookScan top-20 print book list (The Girl on the Train, Me Before You, and When Breathe Becomes Air). In the first half of 2015, six books hit both lists. This year, the Amazon e-book list was led by The Girl in the Ice by Robert Bryndza, published by U.K. digital-first publisher Bookouture. Bookouture had two other titles on the Amazon list, and the self-published The Shade of Vampire by Bella Forrest was #7.

Without a new book getting attention in both print and digital formats, it is hard to build a lot of momentum and word-of-mouth publicity, some industry insiders said. “Buzz happens, but less so,” said Alie Hess, a buyer at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Mass. “Girl on the Train and All the Light We Cannot See were the last ones.”

Much more at the source, including this table:

First-Week Print Sales of Top-Selling frontlist Adult Fiction January–June 2016

Title Author Publisher Pub. Date Units Sales
End of Watch Stephen King Scribner June 7 75,000
15th Affair Patterson/Paetro. Little, Brown May 8 66,000
One with You Sylvia Day St. Martin’s April 5 61,000
The Last Mile David Baldacci Grand Central April 24 57,000
Bay of Sighs Nora Roberts Berkley June 14 51,000

If that is how King, Patterson, and Roberts are doing, the smaller fish have to be hurting.

Signature quote:

Neither the booksellers nor publishers interviewed were prepared to say whether the dearth of new frontlist blockbusters is an aberration or the start of a larger trend. “It is curious,” said Stan Hynds, buyer at Northshire Bookstore. “I have no idea if this is a thing or an anomaly.”