An anonymous tipster wrote in a couple days ago, expressing surprise that Ana Marie Cox’s Dog Days had failed to make the NYT bestseller list, considering all the free publicity the paper gave her. So I dashed off a request to the folks at Bookscan and asked how Wonkette was faring.
So far, with numbers rounded up and all that, Cox has sold a grand total of 3,800 copies of Dog Days and the momentum already seems to be dissipating; last week saw a 37.5% drop in sales from the week before (1,000 down from 1,600). Furthermore, the book’s audience is quite narrowly focused, as over a third of Cox’s total sales come from New York and D.C. (The next biggest market for her is Boston, which accounts for 6%, or just over 225 copies). Unfortunately, I forgot to ask for a comparison between those numbers and the first three weeks in the shelf-life of The Washingtonienne, so we can’t really say who came out on top there, but in all fairness 3,800 copies in three weeks is, although apparently not the makings of even an extended bestseller, still an achievement many debut literary novelists would envy.