Last fall she wandered into the book section looking for a book for her son and noticed “Come Back,” a mother-daughter memoir of drug addiction and recovery by Claire and Mia Fontaine that had been a club pick in 2007 but was still featured on the book club shelf. “That is a very different approach.”ĭanielle Owens, a 24-year-old receptionist in Virginia Beach, Va., regularly buys clothes and other supplies for her 2-year-old son at Target. “Target says every month, ‘Here are some new titles we’re bringing to you, and you can trust us, even if you haven’t heard of them,’ ” said Patrick Nolan, director of trade paperback sales for Penguin Group USA. Target “can sell hundreds of thousands of copies of a book that is virtually unknown in the rest of the marketplace,” said Jacqueline Updike, director of adult sales at Random House, one of the world’s largest publishers.īy assembling a collection of books by unheralded authors, Target behaves more like an independent bookstore than like a mere retailer of mainstream must-haves (although, of course, Target sells its share of best-seller list regulars, like James Patterson and Janet Evanovich). Louise Burke, publisher of Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster that released “Still Alice,” said that the book which has sold 174,000 copies over all, according to BookScan has sold more in Target than in any other outlet.Īnd after the chain anointed “The Year of Fog,” a novel by Michelle Richmond about a child’s disappearance, in April 2008, the book went on to sell 152,000 copies of its Target edition, according to Bookscan. “Still Alice,” which was a Target book club pick early this year, has sold 51,000 copies in its Target edition. Not surprisingly, the conspicuous display helps sell books. But in the last few years, much in the way it has cultivated its image as a counterintuitive purveyor of Isaac Mizrahi clothes or Michael Graves tea kettles, Target has been building itself into a tastemaker for books. ![]() ![]() In publishing circles Target has long been known as a place that can move many copies of discounted best sellers, as do other mass-merchant retailers like Wal-Mart and Costco. The ordinary paperback edition has sold 200,000 copies, and this Sunday will be its 22nd week on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list. Martin’s Press, produced exclusively for Target has sold 145,000 copies. Suddenly sales exploded.Ī special edition of the novel that its publisher, St. Indeed, the book, by the first-time novelist Tatiana de Rosnay, was well on its way to sinking out of sight last fall when Target, the discount retailer, chose the paperback version of “Sarah’s Key” as its Bookmarked Club Pick: a choice for a program that designates titles for prominent display throughout the chain’s stores. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, the book sold just 2,000 copies. When “Sarah’s Key,” a novel about an American journalist investigating the 1942 roundup of Jews in Paris, was published in hardcover two years ago, it dropped with a thud.
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