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Book Nook provides readers with insights into the world of books. Vick Mickunas takes you into the center of the publishing world with the latest book buzz, book reviews, and exclusive chats with authors..Home > Blogs > Book Nook > Archives > 2007 > August > 04 > Entry
the skinny on “Skinny Bitch”
Celebrity sells books. Take SKINNY BITCH for example. The book came out in December of 2005. It has sold well. Recently, sales rocketed as Victoria Beckham aka Posh Spice was spotted carrying a copy of the book. It doesn’t matter that Posh claims she has never read a book. The celebrity connection pushed sales into the stratosphere.
An article the other day in the New York Times attempts to analyze the celebrity book sales buzz for SKINNY BITCH:
“Ever since Running Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, first published the raucous, profanity-laced diet book “Skinny Bitch” in December 2005, it has sold steadily. From an initial print run of fewer than 10,000 copies, there are now more than 245,000 in print.
But it wasn’t until Victoria Beckham, also known as the pop star Posh Spice and wife of the soccer player David Beckham, was photographed carrying a copy of it in a Los Angeles boutique in May that the book started climbing the best-seller charts in Britain. When E! News picked up the story in June, the title took off in the United States. On Sunday it was No. 12 on the New York Times best-seller list of paperback advice, how-to and miscellaneous books. This Sunday it will be No. 3.
Defying conventional publishing wisdom, which says that a book must break into the best-seller lists in its first weeks on sale or risk sinking into oblivion, the book, which is a year and a half old, has also gathered steam despite not being sold in mass-market retailers like Wal-Mart, which can often account for a significant proportion of sales.
With a sassy cover featuring a drawing of a slender young woman wearing a tight-fitting body suit and hoop earrings, and holding a pair of oversize sunglasses, the book, by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, promises a “no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls.” That brazen attitude has lured buyers looking for an alternative to the standard dieting tome.
“It’s definitely the most entertaining diet book I’ve ever read,” said Linda Marotta, the lead buyer at Shakespeare & Company, which has four stores in New York City. Ms. Marotta said “Skinny Bitch” had sold “extremely well” in the stores.
The cheeky tone and the authors’ runway pedigrees — Ms. Barnouin is a former model, and Ms. Freedman is a former modeling agent — belie the book’s message, which turns out to be hard-core vegan, with a good helping of animal rights rhetoric that might be more familiar to the Birkenstock brigade than your average diet-seeking book buyer.”
The blog The Huffington Post just threw in their two cents on
“ It is hardly news, of course, that celebrity sells. A survey last year by the global marketing giant WPP Group found that one in four ads now features a celebrity, compared with just one in eight a decade earlier.
Still, there is something wonderfully fantastic about having Posh Spice emerge as a champion of the written word. In what was surely the most stunning part of the Times story, the paper reported that Beckham confided in a 2005 interview that she had never read a book in her life.
Now, nobody would argue that Skinny Bitch has much in common with a well-crafted narrative or an erudite work of nonfiction. Yet there’s no reason the basic formula shouldn’t apply widely.”
Posh Spice was not available for comment.
Vick Mickunas
