National Book Awards Tomorrow
The winners of the National Book Awards will be announced tomorrow night. As the New York Times details, efforts have been made to add some glitz to the event, such as moving the venue from the midtown Marriott to the “cavernously ornate Cipriani Wall Street” and announcing the finalists on TV this year.
Underlying the changes is a desire to make the American awards as influential as the U.K.’s Booker Award (we have often noted that the Bookers have a greater effect on book sales, even in this country).
After the jump, the current Amazon sales rankings for the finalists (as tracked on Publishers Marketplace), along with the highest rankings to date, for titles in the Fiction, Nonfiction and Young People’s categories. We’ll check them again after the winners are announced.
National Book Award Finalists by Amazon Rankings (as of 11/13/12)
#98 (High, #44; 11/9) – Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956, Anne Applebaum, RH/Doubleday— Nonfiction
#157 (High, #13; 10/22) – The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers, Hachette/ Little, Brown — Fiction
#189 (High, #45; 10/28) – The Round House, Louise Erdrich, Harper — Fiction
#198 (High, #16; 9/24) – This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz, Penguin/Riverhead — Fiction
#352 (High, #59 ; 9/11) – The Boy Kings of Texas, Domingo Martinez, Globe Pequot Press/Lyons Press — Nonfiction
#791 (High, #94; 6/28) – Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo, Random House — Nonfiction
#1,276 (High, #11; 5/13) – The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4, Robert A. Caro, RH/Knopf — Nonfiction
#1,363 (High, #900; 11/12) – Endangered, Eliot Schrefer, Scholastic – Young People’s Literature
#2,588 (High, #963; 10/12) – Bomb: The Race to Build–and Steal–the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon, Steve Sheinkin, Macmillan/Flash Point – Young People’s Literature
#2,805 (High, #419; 10/11) – A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s Books — Fiction
#7,382 (High, #173; 5/22) – Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ben Fountain, HarperCollins/Ecco — Fiction
#8,066 (High, #1,126; 11/9) – Never Fall Down, Patricia McCormick, HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray – Young People’s Literature
#10,023 (High, #2,027, 10/13) – House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East, Anthony Shadid, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt— Nonfiction
#12,778 (High,#756, 10/11) – Goblin Secrets, William Alexander, S&S.Margaret K. McElderry – Young People’s Literature
#25,800 (High, #2,409, 10/11) – Out of Reach, Carrie Arcos, S&S/Simon Pulse – Young People’s Literature