Stephen Colbert’s call to make California by Edan Lepucki (Hachette/Little, Brown) a NYT best seller has worked. It debuted on the July 27 Hardcover Fiction list at #3.

Colbert urged his audience to buy the book through independent booksellers, rather than Amazon, as a protest against the company’s strong-arming publisher Hachette as part of their terms negotiations.

But now that the book is on best seller lists, it is also rising on Amazon, hitting #208 this morning. Before it was published, when Amazon was not making pre-orders available, it was at #1,610,422 (how it had any ranking a tall when it couldn’t be ordered is a puzzle). After publication on July 8, it rose to #686.

The novel, which was a LibraryReads pick before Colbert made it the centerpiece of his protest, has also been receiving strong reviews in the consumer press:

The New York Times Book Review, Edan Lepucki’s California

San Francisco Chronicle, California, by Edan Lepucki

The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Secrets divide and destroy in Edan Lepucki’s dystopian novel, California

The Los Angeles Times — A grave new world awaits in Edan Lepucki’s California

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014 at 7:54 am and is filed under 2014 -- Summer, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.