Booksellers Brace for ‘Mockingjay’ Landing
By Julie Bosman
Published: August 23, 2010, New York Times

Long before it was published, it reached the coveted top spot on Amazon.com. Its publisher ordered an enormous number of copies printed. Eager readers have planned to celebrate its arrival at elaborate midnight release parties.

“Mockingjay,” the final volume of Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy, comes out on Tuesday from Scholastic.
It is not “Harry Potter” or “Twilight,” but there are echoes of those phenomena in the reception of “Mockingjay,” the final volume of Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” books, a trilogy of dystopian young-adult novels.

Booksellers around the country are hoping that “Mockingjay,” which is set to be published on Tuesday, will give them a much-needed lift in sales as the summer draws to a close.
“It will be the biggest book in the Y.A. section, probably for the entire year,” said Sarah Hutton, the children’s book buyer and store manager at Village Books in Bellingham, Wash., using the shorthand for young-adult books.

The “Hunger Games” trilogy unfolds in a grim future-world where children are sent into an arena to fight to the death. Ms. Collins has described the story as rooted in the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

While dystopian fiction for teenagers has been around for decades, it has recently experienced a small revival in books like “The Maze Runner” by James Dashner and “Incarceron” by Catherine Fisher. Many of these books have also built a considerable audience among adults.
Much of the conversation about the “Hunger Games” trilogy has happened online, from fan fiction to Facebook pages devoted to the series.

“The teen market is all over the place, but they are what is selling at the moment,” said Connie Griffin, the children’s book specialist at Bookworks in Albuquerque. “We’re getting away from the whole fallen-angels thing, the high school dramas, the dragons and the straight mysteries.”

Scholastic, publisher of the “Hunger Games” trilogy, has planned to print 1.2 million copies of “Mockingjay” and issued strict orders that booksellers not sell it until 12:01 a.m. Tuesday.

At Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., managers have ordered 3,600 copies of “Mockingjay,” a supply they hope will last about three weeks. Gerry Donaghy, the new-book purchasing supervisor at Powell’s, said he expected the book would be right behind the Stieg Larsson “Millennium” series in sales for the year.
More at NYT.

Footnote:
Scholastic companies around the globe planned a Tuesday release so NZ readers were the first in the world to be able to buy/read the book yesterday.