Last summer, the publishing house Bloomsbury USA drew substantial criticism for featuring a white girl with long, straight hair on the cover of Australian author Justine Larbalestier’s “Liar,” a young adult novel about a girl whom the author describes as “black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short.” At the time, Larbalestier blogged not only about her own disappointment but about similar examples of cover whitewashing, and the pervasive belief among publishing professionals that “black books don’t sell” -an assumption apparently based on the premise that a “black cover” is the primary characteristic distinguishing such books from better selling titles. “Yet I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them,” said Larbalestier (adding in a footnote, “And most of those were written by white people”). “Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with ‘black covers’ don’t sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with ‘white covers.’”
Eventually, after the blog-driven uproar grew loud enough, Bloomsbury changed the cover to better reflect the protagonist’s appearance. “I hope that the debate that’s arisen because of this cover will widen to encompass the whole industry,” Larbalestier wrote, continuing:
I hope it gets every publishing house thinking about how incredibly important representation is and that they are in a position to break down these assumptions. Publishing companies can make change. I really hope that the outrage the US cover of “Liar” has generated will go a long way to bringing an end to white washing covers. Maybe even to publishing and promoting more writers of color.
Apparently, though, the kerfuffle didn’t even get Bloomsbury thinking too hard. The same publisher has done it again, releasing Jaclyn Dolamore’s “Magic Under Glass” — the protagonist of which is clearly described as having brown skin — with a young white woman on the cover. Bloomsbury’s fear of losing the white market was evidently greater than their embarrassment over the “Liar” debacle — unless, of course, what they chiefly learned from the “Liar” debacle is that you don’t need to put as much money into publicizing a novel if its packaging is sufficiently controversial (in which case, you’re welcome, jerks).
I’d put my money on the former, though. Larbalestier’s cover was the first to gain significant attention for whitewashing, but it wasn’t the first, and thanks to the enduring strength of the simplistic “covers with people of color don’t sell” belief, no one should be surprised it wasn’t the last. In an article on race in children’s publishing, Mitali Perkins quotes Ursula Le Guin, who said at BookExpo America in 2004, “Even when [my characters] aren’t white in the text, they are white on the cover. I know, you don’t have to tell me about sales! I have fought many cover departments on this issue, and mostly lost. But please consider that ‘what sells’ or ‘doesn’t sell’ can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If black kids, Hispanics, Indians both Eastern and Western, don’t buy fantasy — which they mostly don’t — could it be because they never see themselves on the cover?” (Three years later, the advance reading copies of Le Guin’s “Powers” were “released with a white model on the cover despite the protagonist’s Himalayan ancestry.”)
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that covers with people of color on them don’t sell, and it’s only because of the cover images — not a lack of publicity and marketing support from the publishing house, the books being crappy, the authors being unknown, the booksellers shelving them incorrectly, the sad state of book sales in general, or all of the above. Even if this were a scientifically proven fact, there would still be good reasons for publishers to stop trying to fix the problem with white models. For starters, there’s the plain dishonesty of it. That’s apparently not a major concern, judging not only by the persistence of cover whitewashing but by the charming words of an anonymous publisher who told critic Jessica Mann that the decision to put a female corpse on the cover of a crime novel with a male victim was made because “Dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don’t.” Since most readers never pay attention to who published any given book, the bait and switch probably has little effect on publishers’ credibility, granted — but you’d think they’d be more concerned with damaging the reputations of authors who supply the basic product. In Larbalestier’s case, it was particularly problematic because her protagonist was, as the title suggests, a liar. Nevertheless, she writes, “I worked very hard to make sure that the fundamentals of who Micah is were believable: that she’s a girl, that she’s a teenager, that she’s black, that she’s USian. One of the most upsetting impacts of the cover is that it’s led readers to question everything about Micah: If she doesn’t look anything like the girl on the cover maybe nothing she says is true. At which point the entire book, and all my hard work, crumbles.” Of course, authors are a dime a dozen, and those who don’t sell — even because of problems created by the publishing house — can always be dropped. Still, actively sabotaging your own authors can’t make very good business sense, can it?
And beyond that, I’m going to out myself as a Pollyanna and make the radical suggestion that maybe sales numbers aren’t the only important factor to consider here. Yeah, I know, faceless corporations, profits, shareholders, blah blah blah. But the decision-makers here are still human beings — and more important, so are the consumers. In addition to the high probability that publishers have created a self-fulfilling prophecy where covers featuring models of color are concerned, they are hurting people with their current practices. Blogger Ari of Reading in Color writes in an open letter to Bloomsbury:
I’m sure you can’t imagine what it’s like to wander through the teen section of a bookstore and only see one or two books with people of color on them. Do you know how much that hurts? Are we so worthless that the few books that do feature people of color don’t have covers with people of color? It’s upsetting, it makes me angry and it makes me sad. Can you imagine growing up as a little girl and wanting to be white because not only do you not see people who look like you on TV, you don’t see them in your favorite books either…. Do you know how sad I feel when my middle school age sister tells me she would rather read a book about a white teen than a person of color because “we aren’t as pretty or interesting.” She doesn’t know the few books that do exist out there about people of color because publishing houses like yourself don’t put people of color on the covers. And my little brother doesn’t even like to read, he wants to read about cool people who look like him, but he doesn’t see those books in bookstores and now he rarely reads.
Putting a white person on the cover of a book about a brown-skinned character doesn’t merely imply that people of color aren’t worth as much to publishers; it pretty much says it outright. Because the only reason to do it is the assumption that a book won’t hit its sales target unless white people buy it — i.e., that white people are the market that really matters. When you look only at the numbers, that’s probably true to some extent — a higher percentage of white people means a bigger pool of potential consumers — and it’s true that white people often don’t buy books by and/or about people of color. But I can make an educated guess that one other thing is also true: Books by and/or about white people fail in much larger numbers, if only because so many more of them are published in the first place. And that hasn’t stopped publishers from signing up new white authors or putting white models on their book covers.
So really, publishers, if you’re so convinced that a book with a dark-skinned heroine won’t sell unless readers are tricked into thinking she’s white, then just be honest about all of it — admit that you don’t want to risk publishing books about characters of color. Admit that white people are the only audience you really care about. Admit that you don’t give a tiny rat’s ass about that adolescent girl walking through a bookstore, trying to find a story about someone who looks like her and learning –probably for the umpteenth time that day — that only white people can be pretty or interesting. But if you’re not ready to admit all that, then you need to be putting people of color on covers where appropriate and supporting those books with real publicity and marketing budgets, so they stand a chance of not fulfilling your prophecy of doom.
Meanwhile, as consumers, we can put pressure on publishers to stop engaging in a deceptive, racist and hurtful practice, and explaining it away with a tired axiom that helps create the very problem it defines. Unfortunately, the most obvious protest, a boycott of these titles or Bloomsbury altogether, would hurt innocent authors and reinforce the impression that the market doesn’t want books about people of color. But as Anna North at Jezebel suggests, there’s no reason not to send a bunch of angry letters. Adds Ari at Reading in Color, “We should keep blogging, emailing, writing about this issue” — Bloomsbury’s been shamed into doing the right thing once before, at least. And as Larbalestier said back in July, perhaps the most important thing we can do — especially white people, who could easily read nothing but books about ourselves, and far too often take that option — is prove the prevailing wisdom wrong. “When was the last time you bought a book with a person of colour on the front cover or asked your library to order one for you?” she asks. If you want to see more of them, here’s her best advice: “Go buy one right now. “
Kate Harding is the co-author of "Lessons From the Fatosphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body" and has been a regular contributor to Salon's Broadsheet.
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Unless you’ve been trapped under a very large P.C. for the last year, you’ve likely heard the about Apple’s rumored new tablet device (now being heralded as the “iSlate”). The device is thought to be an 8 (or 10, or 11) inch flat iPod-like gadget that will be a mix between a Mac laptop and a Kindle. Most rumors suggest that it will have a touch interface and video capabilities, and, thanks to today’s Wall Street Journal, it has a likely release date: March. (According to the article, Apple will show it to the public later this month.)
Although anticipation has already reached a fever pitch (just take a look at Twitter’s most popular topics on most days) book publishers have an especially vested interest in the gadget. While there have been numerous electronic book readers coming out in the last year (including the most recent, The Skiff), few have managed to capture the public’s imagination beyond the Amazon Kindle – which hasn’t exactly done much for publishers’ bottom line. Many people in the beleaguered industry are hoping that device will do for reading what the iPod and iTunes did for music. A survey among booksellers claimed that an Apple e-reader would one of the main factors that will help push digital publishing forward.
But will the tablet be the game-changer they’re hoping for? The internet is buzzing with opinions, rumors — and wishful thinking.
A widely circulated report by analyst Yair Reiner from investment firm Oppenheimer suggests that the tablet will have a major effect on the way the publishing industry sells its goods. Says Reiner:
“Contacts in the US tell us Apple is approaching book publishers with a very attractive proposal for distributing their content …. Apple will split revenue 30/70 (Apple/publisher); give the same deal to all comers; and not request exclusivity. We believe the typical Kindle/publisher split is 50/50, rising to 30/70 if Kindle is given ebook exclusivity”
“As innovative as it is, we believe the Kindle has disgruntled the publishing industry (book, newspaper, and magazine) by demanding exclusivity, disallowing advertising, and demanding a wolfish cut of revenue. The tablet is set to change that. It should also make ebooks more relevant for education by simplifying functions such as scribbling marginalia.”
Reiner’s report fits nicely into Simon & Schuster and Hachette’s recent decision to delay e-book releases for their titles – itself a bold shot at Amazon and the Kindle:
“There is reason to believe that the four-month delay will be a one-off gambit on the part of Schuster and Hachette. Under this theory, the publishers will take advantage of Apple’s new tablet, which will coincidentally launch four months into 2010”
More good news: In a recent piece, the NYT’s David Carr raved that a tablet has the potential to “to renew the romance between printed material and consumer,” and, if enough companies agree to stop giving away digital content for free change the marketplace:
“A simple, reliable interface for gaining access to paid content can do amazing things: Five years ago, almost no one paid for music online and now, nine billion or so songs sold later, we know that people are willing to pay if the price is right and the convenience is there.”
But what about the books themselves? According to Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, the “World’s Largest Christian Publisher,” the tablet has the potential to make e-books far more interactive and flexible:
“Publishers will need to envision multimedia content from the beginning. Once consumers get used to this kind of rich media, they will not be content to read text alone. They certainly won’t pay a premium price for it. They will expect hyperlinks, audio, video, and other multimedia bells and whistles … We will eventually think of [print books] as ‘souvenirs’ (to quote Tim O’Reilly) or decorative artifacts for our home or office. Most people will consume content digitally.”
As Oreilly Radar points out, the tablet has a particular promise for travel books (which could combine “maps, Wikipedia, live review sites, reservations/ticketing systems, video libraries, trip photos, messages and discussion threads, and fellow travelers’ notes of interest”), children’s books (with updated versions of the “pop-up”), comics and graphic novels (which would allow “storytellers to create multiple outcome forks based on different narrative paths chosen by the reader”) and textbooks (allowing embeddable videos and games).
Speaking of textbooks, Coursesmart, a venture of five textbook publishers recently created this video to describe how a (hypothetical) tablet might revolutionize their product (with lecture videos, easy electronic textbook purchases, and more interactivity):
The Chicago Sun-Times claims that the tablet will likely be the device to bring comic books into the digital realm – and believes that a company called LongBox is working on precisely that:
“This is a form of storytelling that needs a tablet. A big, page-sized color screen with lots of resolution and a touch interface for turning pages and navigating from panel to panel.”
With all this potential, it’s hard to blame publishers for getting excited — but as Gizmodo aptly notes, how will already-struggling publishing houses manage to pay for this kind of interactive new content?
“As soon as a book includes video, a publishing house becomes a production house and a writer becomes a director/editor. Stephen King’s prose might send chills up your spine, but the local cable commercial quality video blurb sitting beside it won’t have the budgetary love of a Hollywood flick, at least, not unless Stephen King or somebody else is going to take a paycut (or sell a LOT more books).”
Jack Shafer from Slate is even more negative in a recent piece called “The Tablet Hype,” in which he concludes that, once tablet technology picks up, publishers won’t be any better off than they already are:
“Once the various tablet devices and smartphones collapse into super-ultralight PCs, the tablet-optimized publications will find themselves regarded by consumers as just another Web site, and the proprietors who thought they had a new, impregnable platform from which to sluice profits will be right back where they started—one site struggling against many.”
After 164 years of publishing, Scientific American — “probably the [United States'] most venerable source of science news written for a general audience,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education — finally has its first female editor in chief, Mariette DiChristina. A 20-year veteran of science journalism, DiChristina has been Scientific American’s acting editor in chief since June, but now it’s official.
In an interview with Fishbowl NY, DiChristina didn’t seem too fussed by the historic significance of the promotion — “I think anybody who is a position of leadership should feel a sense of responsibility. And I don’t know if mine is any greater or less because I’m a first for the magazine. I know I’m very honored and grateful” — but she also underscored why it’s so important: “I have two young daughters; one of them wants to be a scientist, and the other one wants to be the editor of Scientific American.” Granted, those are probably the only little girls in the U.S. who could name the editor in chief of Scientific American, but the symbolic value of DiChristina’s achievement still shouldn’t be underestimated.
It seems like every other week at Broadsheet we’re writing about another study that found girls have the raw material to be just as good as boys at math and science, but are held back by a lack of confidence, support, role models and mentoring. (And even if enough of them make it all the way through college with their desire to pursue science intact, as soon as a field starts approaching gender equality, its perceived value begins to drop.) However many strides women have made in the workforce, we’re still unaccustomed to seeing them in leadership positions in science-related professions, and still arguing endlessly about whether that’s a function of nature or nurture. Mariette DiChristina’s achievement at least drags us an inch closer to a world in which other people’s young daughters will see “scientist” as a viable career goal — and maybe even find fewer obstacles on the way there.
Kate Harding is the co-author of "Lessons From the Fatosphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body" and has been a regular contributor to Salon's Broadsheet.
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The National Book Foundation will present its annual National Book Awards in downtown Manhattan Wednesday night, at a gala event in the glittering, Greek-revival setting of Cipriani Wall Street. The ceremony’s organizers labor mightily to bring glamour to a notoriously dowdy industry, and no doubt the evening will be thrilling for both nominees and winners.
Literary awards are more than just ego boosts these days. As the critic James Wood observed a few years back, “prizes are the new reviews,” the means by which many people now decide which books to buy, when they bother to buy books at all. There are some 400,000 titles published per year in the U.S. alone — one new book every minute and a half — according to Bowker, a company providing information services to the industry, and there are fewer people with the time and inclination to read them. If you only read, for example, about five novels per year (a near-heroic feat of literacy for the average American), you could limit yourself to just the winners of the NBA, the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle, the Booker Prize and then, oh, a Hugo or Edgar winner — or even a backlist title by that year’s Nobel Prize winner. You’d never have to lower your sights to anything unlaureled by a major award.
On the other hand, if you’ve just self-published a book on parrot keeping or your theories on how the world could be better run (a favorite topic of retired gentlemen), what can you do? If you weren’t able to find a publisher who wanted it, you can also expect to be routinely disqualified for review in the general media and, above all, for prizes. Yet have no fear, you Cinderellas of the publishing game, because (to nab a line from someone else’s promotional campaign) there’s an app for that.
An e-mail press release for a book crossed my desk not long ago, prominently garnished with a large medallion proclaiming it a winner of “The National Best Books 2009 Awards.” For a moment, I misread that as “National Book Award,” and did a double take, which is surely what whoever came up with that name intended. Curiosity about the National Best Books 2009 Awards led me to the Web site for USA Book News, produced by an outfit called JPX Media, which claims offices in Los Angeles and New York.
USA Book News is essentially a roll of press releases, featuring reproductions of the covers of relatively new books, accompanied by their flap copy and links to author Web sites. It’s a somewhat random mix of titles, ranging from the very high profile, such as Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol,” to the solid mid-list, like a new biography of Clint Eastwood, all from established publishers. Any self-published author would be pleased to see his or her book in this respectable company, although the company itself would be oblivious to the fact. “I have never heard of this site, was not asked; nor was I informed that my book was listed there,” Shel Israel, author of “Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods,” replied to my e-mail inquiry. To the extent that any mention might help an author, he’s pleased to be included, but “I have no evidence that this listing has helped me in sales.”
Why bother to set up a Web site regurgitating cover art and promo copy that anybody can find on Amazon.com? The answer, of course, lies in the National Best Books 2009 Awards, a contest that features no fewer than “150 active categories,” including three subcategories of “Animals/Pets” and 13 subcategories of business books. There’s a prize for the best children’s book on the theme of “Mind/Body/Spirit” and for the best history of media and entertainment. By all indications (JPX Media did not respond to phone calls requesting information), everyone who enters in any category winds up listed as a “finalist,” and some categories are so specific (“Mythology & Folklore”) that they have only one entry.
Best of all, as USABN’s Web site freely promises, “the National Best Books Awards are the ONLY Awards Program in the nation that offers direct coverage to the book buying public for every entry.” Like the Special Olympics, this is a competition that everybody wins. If you enter the 2010 contest by the end of this year, they’ll even throw in a “six-month full-color listing on USABookNews.com,” which is “valued at $1500.00!” despite the fact that none of the publishers whose books are listed there now seem to have paid for this service or even to be aware that it’s been provided.
Every winner and finalist — i.e., everyone who enters — can purchase gold medal-style stickers announcing the fact, which can then be slapped on the cover of the book, making it look deceptively similar to books that have won legitimate prizes like the Newbery Medal. The fee for all this is $69 (about what you’d pay to nominate your book for the National Book Awards or the Pulitzer), though you do have to pay it for each category you wish to enter; if, say, you want to send in your children’s book about Mind/Body/Spirit issues in the history of the media, you’d have to pay $138 to enter it in both categories.
That’s still not much cash to shell out for a bogus award that will impress those friends and relatives who haven’t heard of the National Book Awards in the first place and will perhaps even (briefly) deceive the few who have. Yet with 150 categories, the takings do add up. A press release for the National Best Books 2009 Awards claims “500 winners and finalists,” which comes to the nonshabby sum of $34,500 (and that’s before whatever markup they get on the stickers) — not bad for the cost of setting up a basic Web site with content that can be cut and pasted from the Web in an afternoon or two. Nowhere on USA Book News does it say who, if anyone, actually reads the books submitted to the awards; presumably, the winners could be chosen at random.
In short, the National Best Books Awards are vanity book awards, a new twist in the age-old practice of profiting off the dreams of aspiring writers. Ironically, real awards like the NBAs may not be that much better at selling books than the NBBAs. As publishing maven Michael Cader recently told the Wall Street Journal, the fiction nominees for the NBA “tend to be as a group not commercially successful, and the act of being nominated spurs modest commercial interest but tends not to drive sales in any significant quantity.”
It’s quite possible that someone who wins an NBA tonight will have earned less in royalties from his or her book than JPX Media will make by running a fake-out of the NBAs. There’s simply more money in selling services to would-be writers than there is in selling actual books to readers, since the former are rapidly coming to outnumber the latter. And that, certainly, is nothing to celebrate.
Today, Double X editors Hanna Rosin and Emily Bazelon announced that the newish ladymag is about to return to its roots as a ladyblog. Or, as Gawker put it, “Six months after the Slate Group launched Double X as ‘a new kind of women’s online magazine,’ it’s being transformed into a section of Slate.com, a very old kind of men’s online magazine.” (Which led to our favorite comments: “Slate is a men’s magazine?” Followed by, “And Salon is for women. Angry, angry, angry women.”)
Rosin and Bazelon assure readers, “For many of you, this won’t much change your experience of reading us. We will have many of the same bloggers and writers, and Hanna and Emily will continue to run the project. The decision is being made for business reasons rather than as an editorial judgment.” No layoffs have been confirmed yet, but a business decision that results in only “many of the same bloggers and writers” working for them does suggest that there will be some sad changes as they transition to a “more intimate version of the community we have built.” Such is the nature of journalism these days, unfortunately; in even sadder news, Window Media, the country’s largest publisher of LGBT newspapers, announced today that it’s closing six papers.
On the plus side, innovation and new models are alsothe nature of journalism today. Editors at the Washington Blade, one of the closing Window Media papers, are already regrouping to plan a new publication — and Double X, of course, will continue on as a part of Slate. We wish everyone there the very best, and we look forward to reading what comes next. There are worse gigs than being part of a women’s issues blog on a larger news and culture site, we can tell you that much.
Kate Harding is the co-author of "Lessons From the Fatosphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body" and has been a regular contributor to Salon's Broadsheet.
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1. “The Gathering Storm (Wheel of Time)” by Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson (TOR Books)
2. “The Lost Symbol” by Dan Brown (Doubleday)
3. “True Blue” by David Baldacci (Grand Central)
4. “The Scarpetta Factor” by Patricia Cornwell (Putnam Adult)
5. “Pursuit of Honor: A Novel” by Vince Flynn (Atria)
6. “Last Night in Twisted River” by John Irving (Random House)
7. “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett (Putnam/Amy Einhorn)
8. “Nine Dragons” by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
9. “Grave Secret” by Charlaine Harris (Berkley)
10. “The Last Song” by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central Publishing)
11. “Southern Lights: A Novel” by Danielle Steel (Delacorte Press)
12. “Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel” by Jeannette Walls (Scribner)
13. “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt)
14. “A Touch of Dead” by Charlaine Harris (Ace)
15. “Angel Time” by Anne Rice (Knopf)
HARDCOVER NONFICTION
1. “The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy” by Bill Simmons (Ballantine/ESPN)
2. “SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance” by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (William Morrow)
3. “Have a Little Faith: A True Story” by Mitch Albom (Hyperion)
4. “What The Dog Saw: And Other Adventures” by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)
5. “Arguing With Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government” by Glenn Beck (Threshold Editions)
6. “The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl” by Ree Drummond (William Morrow Cookbooks)
7. “Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer–And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place” by Suzanne Somers (Crown Publishing)
8. “Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves” by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Viking)
9. “True Compass: A Memoir” by Edward M. Kennedy (Twelve)
10. “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown and Company)
11. “Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters” by Chesley B. Sullenberg with Jeffrey Zaslow (William Morrow)
12. “The Conscious Cook: Delicious Meatless Recipes That Will Change the Way You Eat ” by Tal Ronnen (Morrow)
13. “Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul: How to Create a New You ” by Deepak Chopra (Harmony)
14. “My Life Outside the Ring” by Hulk Hogan with Mark Dagostino (St. Martin’s Press)
15. “Jim Cramer’s Getting Back To Even” by James J. Cramer with Cliff Mason (Simon & Schuster)
MASS MARKET PAPERBACKS
1. “The Associate” by John Grisham (Dell)
2. “The Untamed Bride” by Stephanie Laurens (Avon)
3. “Cross Country” by James Patterson (Vision)
4. “Deadlock” by Iris Johansen (St. Martin’s Paperbacks)
5. “Hot on Her Heels” by Susan Mallery (HQN)
6. “Bound to Shadows” by Keri Arthur (Dell)
7. “Star Wars 501st: an Imperial Commando Novel” by Karin Traviss (LucasBooks)
8. “Angels at Christmas” by Debbie Macomber (Mira)
9. “Your Heart Belongs to Me” by Dean Koontz (Random House)
10. “Queen of Song and Souls” by C.L. Wilson (Leisure Books)
11. “While My Sister Sleeps” by Barbara Delinsky (Anchor)
12. “Heat Lightning” by John Sandford (Berkley)
13. “To Desire a Devil” by Elizabeth Hoyt (Vision)
14. “Scarpetta” by Patricia Cornwell (Berkley)
15. “The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife” by Jillian Hunter (Ballantine Books)
TRADE PAPERBACKS
1. “Bed of Roses” by Nora Roberts (Berkley)
2. “Push” by Sapphire (Vintage)
3. “The Shack” by William P. Young (Windblown Media)
4. “Say You’re One of Them” by Uwem Akpan (Little, Brown)
5. “Olive Kitteredge” by Elizabeth Strout (Random House Trade Paperbacks)
6. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson (Vintage)
7. “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger (Mariner Books)
8. “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial)
9. “The Glass Castle: A Memoir” by Jeannette Walls (Scribner)
10. “The Art of Racing in the Rain” (Garth Stein) (Harper)
11. “Run for Your Life” by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge (Grand Central)
12. “Freakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (Harper Perennial)
13. “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” by Tucker Max (Citadel)
14. “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” by Jamie Ford (Ballantine Books)
15. “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Penguin)
Detail from cover of "Magic Under Glass" 
