Bill Keller's Book Sales No Great Shakes

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Mixed Media

by Jeff Bercovici

Main

Tomorrow's Wood Today: Predicting th... Today's Wood Today: We Were All Wrong

Mar 11 2008 6:00AM EDT

If you thought being the executive editor of The New York Times guarantees your book will be a best-seller, here's proof that it doesn't.

Since going on sale in mid-January, Bill Keller's Tree Shaker: The Story of Nelson Mandela has sold a scant 926 copies so far, according to Nielsen BookScan. Of course, BookScan only measures around 70 percent of retail sales. And, since Keller's book is aimed at adolescents, not adults, it can probably count on doing steady business from school libraries.

It's not as though Tree Shaker had a big publicity push behind it. It's received virtually no press -- that is, apart from a writeup in The New York Times Book Review and another Times mention, earlier this month, in the aptly-named "Editor's Choice" column.

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