Where The Crawdads Sing
Shortly after Delia Owens’s “Where the Crawdads Sing” was published last Aug. 14, Reese Witherspoon picked it as a selection for her Hello Sunshine book club, telling The Times she “loved every page of it.” It was a lucky break. The debut novel — which had a solid first printing of 27,500 — landed at No. 9 on the paper’s best-seller list on Sept. 16.
Then the book, about a young girl surviving alone in a coastal North Carolina marsh, did something unusual. Instead of lingering at the bottom of the list for a few weeks before slipping off altogether, as a small novel might be expected to do, “Where the Crawdads Sing” started to climb — and climb, and climb — finally reaching No. 1 on Jan. 20, which is where you can still find it today. It has now been on the list for 29 weeks.
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Summary writing tips. So what happened? How has a small literary novel flourished while hyped books by big-name authors have flashed on and off the list? “Reese’s pick skyrocketed awareness,” says Alexis Welby, the publicity director of Putnam, “and the word-of-mouth just continued to grow from there.” Readers, she says, “just have to push the book into the hands of others so they can talk about it.” It’s now been rated over 125,000 times on Goodreads and has a 5-star rating on Amazon, where it’s been reviewed more than 7,400 times.
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In December, the novel got another nice shot of publicity when Fox 2000 acquired it for film and tapped Witherspoon to produce.
On March 4, Owens announced on her website that a million books had been sold. That number has since reached 1.5 million across all formats (e-book, audio and so on). The March spike, Welby says, had a lot to do with a “CBS Sunday Morning” profile of Owens that aired on March 17: “It had a huge effect on sales and finding new readers and awareness for Delia and the book.”
Delia Owens
“‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ is about loneliness,” Owens recently wrote on her website. “I have lived an isolated and lonely life, but from the moment my incredible readers picked up the book, I have not felt alone again.”
That’s partly because she’s spent so much time traveling around the country these last few months meeting her fans. Putnam has sent Owens out on multiple publicity tours — three so far, with a fourth and fifth scheduled. One thing that’s not scheduled yet is the book’s paperback publication. Since “Where the Crawdad Sings” is still selling so briskly in hardcover, there’s no need to plan for a paperback edition just yet.