SF/F/H on General Bestseller Lists
29 Nov 1999

It seems a bit premature, but Amazon.com has posted lists of 1999's bestsellers. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books rank #1, #2, and #3, with Thomas Harris's Hannibal at #5, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon #36, Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon #39, King's Hearts in Atlantis #45, and Anne Rice's Vittorio the Vampire at #100. (The Amazon.com editors also compiled a Best Books of 1999 list, including fiction and nonfiction, which ranks Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at #3 and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets at #24. The separate Best SF/Fantasy list has already been noted.)

Amazon.com's 1999 SF & Fantasy Bestsellers (including, like the main list, new books and old, hardcovers and paperbacks) are books by, in order, Terry Brooks, Neal Stephenson, Robert Jordan, Neal Stephenson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Orson Scott Card, George R.R. Martin, Neal Stephenson... etc. (But if Terry Brooks leads Cryptonomicon on this list, why isn't Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on the overall list?)

On the weekly lists, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books still lead all the major US lists, occupying the top three hardcover fiction slots of the NYT, LAT, WP, and SF Chronicle lists, and the top three slots in Amazon's Hot 100 Books list.

Michael Crichton's Timeline is #1 on the PW list and #4 on Amazon's Hot 100 list (as of Monday) but so far has broken onto only two of the newspapers' weekly lists, SF Chronicle's at #7 and USAT's at #5. But it's important to note that the weekly lists are not coterminous. The SFC list is ''compiled each Tuesday from phone calls to booksellers...'' and so the 11/28 list presumably covers the period roughly 11/16 through 11/22 (the first week Crichton was on sale). The USAT list of 11/24 covers ''last week''. The 11/28 WP list covers the period 10/31 - 11/6; the 11/28 NYT list is for the weekend ending 11/13; and the LAT and PW lists do not specify the period. Timeline leads this week's Amazon.com's SF bestsellers.

William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties (Putnam) drops two to #9 on the San Francisco Chronicle list, and has dropped off the LAT and NYT lists. It rose three to #18 on Amazon's hardcover fiction list, but never placed on PW's list at all.

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's Dune: House Atreides (Bantam Spectra) is a NYT also-ran at #20 and has dropped off the LAT and WP lists. It's #13, down two, on Amazon's hardcover fiction list, and #14, down two, on PW's list. It's #2 on Amazon's SF bestseller list.

Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis rose five at NYT to #12 and dropped slightly to #10 on both the Amazon hardcover and PW fiction lists.

In Britain, Terry Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant is #4 on Amazon.uk's Hot 100 list, with Timeline #11.

Debuting on NYT's also-ran list at #27: Raymond E. Feist's Krondor the Assassins (Avon Eos).

Links to other Bestseller lists:

LAT | NYT | SF Chronicle | USAT | WP | PW
Amazon | Amazon UK | B&N | Borders