bestsellers

After a 10-year run, and less than a year after the seventh and final book in J. K. Rowling’s series was published, the Harry Potter books have fallen — as of the May 11 issue of the Book Review, which went to press last night — off The Times’s best-seller list.

Here are the next ten books guaranteed to become overnight bestsellers via the Richard and Judy effect.

Although competing lists are produced by as many as 40 daily newspapers and by Publisher’s Weekly, the Times list — there are actually 13 of them, divided by categories of books — “is the gold standard,” said Larry Kirshbaum, a literary agent. Much of what the publishing world thinks it knows about the list is wrong or out of date.

I didn't notice it until now, but this weekend the NY Times separated it's paperback bestseller list into one for mass market paperbacks and one for trade paperbacks. The idea is the latest cheap thrillers won't overwhelm the more literary paperbacks in the list. The NY Times bestseller list is the most widely followed, but also pretty opaque and receives a lot of criticism.

Dr. Alaa al Aswany is the most famous dentist in the Arab world. His second novel became the bestselling novel in Arabic in 2002 and retained that spot until recently. Al Aswany’s latest novel now holds that honor. The dentist says that his patients are his window to the world.