A few weeks ago, Edan Lepucki was a new writer hoping to sell 12,000 copies of her first book, “California,” a dystopian novel set in a future where global warming, an oil crisis, and drugs have left America in anarchic ruin.
Cue Stephen Colbert, who began attacking Amazon for discouraging customers from buying books from his publisher Hachette Book Group, and decided to start promoting Lepucki’s book “California” without Amazon’s help. “We are going to prove I can sell more books than Amazon,” Stephen Colbert said last month on The Colbert Report.
Since Colbert began promoting California on air and via Twitter, Lepucki’s novel saw a sky rocket in pre-order sales to 10,000 copies prior to hitting shelves on July 8. “Of course, because of the Colbert thing everything is magnified,” Lepucki told Berkeleyside on Tuesday. “All of a sudden you have strangers, a lot of people, reading your work. It’s wonderful and amazing, but there’s an intensity to it.”
We are tackling this novel in next week’s Krystal Clear, and we want to hear from you! Read along with us and let us know your thoughts about the book flying off the shelves by posting your questions and comments right here in the #Bookfriends group, or tweet us using the hashtag #bookfriends.
Tune into Krystal Clear next Wednesday, July 16, at 11:30am ET on msnbc.com and you could see your comment featured in our discussion.
Looking for our previous book club books? Check out Khaled Hosseini’s “And the Mountains Echoed” or Michael Hastings’ “The Last Magazine.”
Krystal Ball