Almost a Bestseller

For a little while today, I was very excited. For a little while today, I thought Something Rotten, my contemporary mystery based on Hamlet, might be a BookSense Bestseller. BookSense is a national marketing campaign put together by a large group of independent booksellers, and each week they collect the sales figures from their member stores and put together a bestseller list to rival the ones printed by The New York Times and USA Today.

So at the very bottom of today's Shelf Awareness, a self-styled e-zine of "daily enlightenment for the book trade," they had recommendations "from last week's BookSense bestseller lists, available at BookSense.com." The only entry under "For Teen Readers"? Something Rotten. But if they took the recommendation from the bestseller list . . . was Something Rotten a bestseller? That would be BIG news.

I scoured the Booksense web site, but all I could find were last week's bestseller lists. Could Rotten be on the new one? I e-mailed editor Liz, asking if she had heard anything, then got back to work. Liz was able to solve the mystery: Something Rotten was not, alas, a bestseller. The good news: it was featured as the sole recommended book beyond the children's bestsellers this week. Check it out:

There I am down in the corner. (Click the image to see it larger.)

So today I am almost a bestseller. On the same page, at least. :-)