William Landay

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Strand Critics Award winners 7.10.2103

Last Wednesday evening in New York, Defending Jacob won the Strand Magazine Critics Award for best novel (details here). Here I am at the award ceremony with fellow honorees Matthew Quirk, who won the Best Debut Novel award for The 500, and Faye Kellerman, who won a lifetime achievement award. A nice night. Many thanks to the Strand. (Photo by yet another best-selling author, Alan Jacobson.)

2012 Wrap-up

It’s been a while since I posted one of these updates, so here are a few year-end developments for Defending Jacob.

  • The novel was named to several “best of 2012” lists, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kirkus Reviews, Toronto Globe and Mail, Kansas City Star, and my hometown Boston Globe.
  • Stephen King included Defending Jacob on his list of “the best books I read in 2012,” in Entertainment Weekly, calling it “the best crime-and-courtroom drama in years.” Very cool.
  • If that isn’t surreal enough for you, Google’s Zeitgeist 2012 list placed the book at #5 and its author #2 among trending search terms for U.S. books and authors, that is, “search queries with the highest amount of traffic over a sustained period in 2012 as compared to 2011.” Mom, is that you Googling me over and over?
  • The town of Sharon, Massachusetts, chose Defending Jacob for its annual “One Book, One Town” program, which means everyone in town will read the book or face criminal prosecution. Or something. (I will be visiting Sharon as part of the event on Saturday, April 6, 2013 at 7:00 pm at the Sharon Middle School.)
  • And just for fun, my favorite pull-quote from a review: “I am so in love with this book, I would marry it if it asked me.” Now that belongs on the cover of the paperback.

The mass-market paperback edition of Defending Jacob goes on sale February 26. The trade paperback edition (the larger paperback format) is coming in a few more months.

As ever, thanks to all of you for sticking with me. Happy 2013!

The backlist is back

The success of Defending Jacob — now in its 17th week on the Times bestseller list, at #23 for ebooks, #24 for hardcovers, among the longest runs on either list — has had a nice byproduct: there is renewed interest in my two earlier books, Mission Flats and The Strangler. Both are being reissued in the U.S. today as trade paperbacks (the larger paperback size) with lovely new covers. The new covers, I think, are truer to the books than the original designs. I particularly like the new Mission Flats cover. If you’re interested in buying either book online, the links are here for Mission Flats and here for The Strangler. Better yet, go to your local independent bookstore.

All good news. There seems to be no other kind lately, for which I am very, very grateful. Thank you. Truly, to all the people who have made Defending Jacob such a roaring success — the many hundreds of thousands who have bought it, read it, passed it around, talked it up, discussed it in book clubs, sent me such kind messages — thank you. It’s been a great run and there’s no end in sight, with the paperback edition still to come and (fingers crossed, if we’re lucky, don’t want to jinx anything, but maybe, just maybe…) the movie. Stay tuned.