HBG Big News This Week: November 4-8, 2019

Following is a recap of major news at Hachette Book Group for the week of November 4-8, 2019:

Bestseller news:  making strong debuts on the New York Times bestseller list this week are Center Street’s The Plot Against the President by Lee Smith (#7 on Print HC Nonfiction, #5 on Combined P&E Nonfiction, and #7 on USA Today); Vision’s Target: Alex Cross by James Patterson (# 2 Mass Market Monthly) and Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly (#5 Mass Market Monthly). Overall, HBG has 17 titles on the NYT list this week; our client publishers have seven books on the list.

Audio bestsellers: Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers (LB) holds onto the #1 spot on the New York Times Audio Nonfiction list for the second consecutive month and Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow debuts at #3 on the Audio Nonfiction list after just 2 weeks on sale. More good news for Hachette Audio, with three new Audio Fiction bestsellers: The Night Fire by Michael Connelly at #4 (LB), The Burning White by Brent Weeks at #13 (Orbit), and The 19th Christmas by James Patterson & Maxine Paetro at #15 (LB).

Major release: LBYR’s Sisters First, the new picture book from Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush, goes on sale next week with media appearances on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Today Show (3 part interview), Access Hollywood, and an NBC TV satellite tour, as well as a People magazine feature, an Associated Press interview, and more.

Nobelists’ book launch: winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo will be busy promoting their book Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems (PublicAffairs) when it launches next week. The authors will be interviewed on PBS Newshour, NPR’s Planet Money, MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Democracy Now!, Vox, Business Insider, LinkedIN, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, Yahoo Finance, Reuters podcast, and the Wall Street Journal will run a review. More coverage to come.  

Colleagues in the media: Peter Osnos, Founder of PublicAffairs, published two interesting articles this week – the first in the New Yorker about his work managing the publication of Donald Trumps first two books, The Art of the Deal and The Art of the Comeback, when he worked at Random House, and the second on Medium, Who Is the Publisher of That Book. Worth reading!

USA Today picks: HBG had 3 of the 5 books listed in USA Today’s feature on the week’s hottest new book releases: Lindy West’s The Witches Are Coming (Hachette Books), Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds (LB), and Flea’s Acid for the Children (GCP).

Apple Books’ Picks: Apple Books’ November picks include David Baldacci’s A Minute to Midnight (GCP) and Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds (LB).