IP Picks🔎: A Data-Driven 'CSI' Procedural
➕ 'A Complete Unknown' with a torch-singer twist and a YA wilderness thriller.
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along.
It’s been a busy week in the land of publishing. We’ve got a new Dan Brown novel coming. The announcement of a Little House on the Prairie reboot. Jeremy Allen White has signed on to star in an adaptation of another book by the author of Call Me by Your Name. And, of course, there was the blockbuster debut of Onyx Storm, the newest entry in Rebecca Yarros' hit romantasy series, which had the best first week of any adult novel in the 20 years that Bookscan has been tracking sales.
The Onyx Storm numbers deserve a bit more attention. The novel sold just shy of 1.3M physical copies in the U.S. and another 155,000 in the U.K. The release also gave a boost to the earlier titles in the series, with Yarros claiming four of the top five spots on Bookscan. We don't have numbers on U.S. eBook or audio sales, but it is the No. 2 Kindle seller on Amazon. Meanwhile, the British trade magazine Bookseller reported that 175,000 eBooks were sold in the U.K. Bookseller also reported that Onyx's sales were 171 percent higher than Fourth Wing's first-week sales, which tracks with what we know about the growing interest in the series.
Still, what’s really interesting to me is that 1.1M of those 1.3M sales came from the book’s “Deluxe Limited Edition.” Sure, the difference in price between that souped-up version and the standard one was only a few bucks, but it underscores a recent trend in publishing: Buyers gravitating to higher-priced (and higher-margin) deluxe editions. That's good news for publishers’ bottom line. But I also think it says something deeper about how, even in this digital age, fans want tangible tokens of their fandom. Think of it as the literary world’s very own version of the popular collectible popcorn buckets sold in movie theaters for such tentpoles as Dune, making this a trend worth keeping an eye on.
On to this week’s picks, which include a pair of biopics and a procedural series with big potential. The full lineup:
A YA survival-thriller about teen hikers who stumble upon a Gabby Petito-like situation
A speculative thriller about a woman in a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s who may or may not be a time traveler from the future
A biopic about the rough early years and unlikely rise of an legendary American singer
A biopic about a legendary female outlaw in the Old West
A true-crime drama centered on a law enforcement task force that used its expertise sifting through mountains of data to bring down a crime ring
