Folks are calling it “The Beyonce Effect.” Just days after being sampled on Bey’s Track, Flawless, off her surprise album, Chimamanda Adichie’s book Americanah climbed over 600 spots on the Amazon Best Sellers list! More on that plus a video of beyonce talking about why she sampled Adichie’s TED talk, after the click.
From the Atlantic:
I looked to see if Adichie’s new fame changed the book’s Amazon sales rank. The answer is unambiguously yes—but the story is more interesting than that.
Amazon tracks which books are selling best on its service in sales rank. When the Harry Potter books could be pre-ordered on Amazon, they stayed #1 for months; currently the top three positions are held by two joke books and a collection of essays by conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer.
At 5 p.m. on December 12, 2013—the day before the album came out—Amazon ranked Americanah #861 of all hardcover books.
Five days later, the book was ranked #632. Today, the book is ranked #179.
It’s a staggering rise up the rankings. Moving with such speed through the top 1,000 books on Amazon is a slog, because books in the top couple hundred slots sell much more than books in the low thousands. It’s much harder to advance from #200 to #199 than it is from #2,000 to #1,999.
Note, the book’s rise was also helped by The New York Times listing it as one of the top 10 books of 2013. Regardless of who helped more, December has been HUGE from Chimamanda and Americanah.
Below is a video of Beyonce talking about imperfection, why she chose the author’s words for ‘Flawless’, and more:
What’d you think?
