2007 BESTSELLERS                            (bulk orders and textbooks excluded)

You had a good chance of making it into our 2007 bestseller list if your name was Elizabeth (Gilbert, Ruth or Hay). Smoke was this year’s One Book One Community selection. Last year’s chosen book was Three Day Road, which sold 344 copies that year placing it at #1. Obviously Harry Potter pulled that spot this year, selling 68% more copies than Three Day Road.

Author events continue to impact out sales: Chrétien, Hay, Beah, Nolen, Gilmour, Malone, and English all did events with Words Worth. Marla Shapiro’s Life in the Balance was a St. Mary’s Hospital event. Likewise, the Judy Chicago book was sold largely to the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery.

Local authors also continue to do well especially with golf books – see #16 and #19. But hardcover fiction is still in decline. Only the Giller (Late Nights on Air) and the G-G (Divisadero) winners, plus the A Thousand Splendid Suns (the new novel by the author of The Kite Runner), made it on our list, compared to four titles on the 2006 list

2006 BESTSELLERS

This year’s top 25 bestsellers at Words Worth books stack up in a pretty even comparison to those of 2005 although they bear little resemblance to Canada-wide lists. Our top seller was Three Day Road, the chosen book of the One Book One Community program. Last year’s list included Hominids, the OBOC choice, along with two other titles by the same author, Robert Sawyer. Stephen Lewis’s Race Against Time actually ranked higher this year at #2 than last at #3. The Giller winner, Bloodletting by Dr. Vincent Lam, stands at #5. This book has sold almost twice as many copies this fall in Canada as previous Giller winners have averaged.


Local authors continued their prominence on the top 25: Proudly She Marched, about the WW2 women’s army training in Kitchener, and John English’s Trudeau bio, Citizen of the World, ranked third and fourth. Local trail guides again meandered across our list: Waterloo Trails at #6, Woolwich Trails at #17, but for the first time in many years, none of Katherine Jacob’s trail guides made the top 25. Two new local authors did well: Tom Slee’s No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart (#18) and Peter Russell’s Manitoulin Rocks (#20). The recently reissued Food That Really Schmecks by the late Edna Staebler tied for #22 with the Da Vinci Code and The Golden Compass.

The latter, a young adult novel, was joined by three other kids books: Charlotte’s Web (#19) Lemony Snicket’s final volume The End (#23) and King Dork (#20). Last year Harry Potter ranked the top bestseller, selling ten times as many copies as the #25 ranked books. King Dork and Tropic of Night (#14) both make the list as the result of handselling – via personal recommendation from Words Worth’s assistant manager, David Worsley.

Environmental concerns drove book sales with The Weather Makers, ranked at #7, Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth at #13, and also the late Jane Jacob’s Dark Age Ahead (#10). By the way, Weather Makers is now out in paperback. There were no environmental titles on last year’s list. Malcolm Gladwell with two titles, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, were the high ranking non-fiction authors in 2005. This year in non-fiction, Karen Armstrong’s overview of world religions, the Great Transformation reached #8.

Hardcover fiction continues to have a hard time making our top bestsellers. This year only Mary Lawson’s Other Side of the Bridge, and Irene Nemirovsky’s tale of WW2 occupied France, Suite Francaise, made the list. Last year, Jane Urquhart’s Map of Glass, was the sole hardcover fiction bestseller. This fall’s sales of new hardcover novels by established authors such as Alice Munro and Wayne Johnston were disappointing. But paperbacks do better, including Gilead, Kite Runner, Inheritance of Loss (a Booker Prize winner), Sweetness in the Belly, and Memory Keeper’s Daughter.

Though remainders and sale books are traditionally excluded from bestseller lists, four title would’ve made our top 25: Home for the Vinyl Café, The Ironic Christian’s Companion, Simon Winchester’s the Meaning of Everything and Finding God in the Garden.

Publishers know that you can’t sustain bestseller status without adequate stock and this year they had many fewer mistakes than previous years. Last minute reprints came through on December 21st for Natalie Maclean’s Red, White and Drunk All Over, and Stephen Brunt’s Searching for Bobby Orr. Mike Holmes on Homes was reprinted a week before these, and You on a Diet and The God Delusion were among many that stayed successfully in stock. On the other hand, Allan Gotlieb’s Washington Diaries, the story of the Nobel Peace Prize winner (Banker to the Poor) and a book called Bird Songs with a built-in audio player, all failed to get reprinted in time.

2005  BESTSELLERS