Target Can Make Sleepy Titles Into Best Sellers

At Target, Bookmarked book club titles get stickers, left, and special shelves, above. Almost one-third of the sales of “Still Alice,” by Lisa Genova, can be traced to Target.









When “Sarah’s Key,” a novel about an American journalist investigating the 1942 roundup of Jews in Paris, was published in hardcover two years ago, it dropped with a thud. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, the book sold just 2,000 copies.

Indeed, the book, by the first-time novelist Tatiana de Rosnay, was well on its way to sinking out of sight last fall when Target, the discount retailer, chose the paperback version of “Sarah’s Key” as its Bookmarked Club Pick: a choice for a program that designates titles for prominent display throughout the chain’s stores. Suddenly sales exploded.



In publishing circles Target has long been known as a place that can move many copies of discounted best sellers, as do other mass-merchant retailers like Wal-Mart and Costco. But in the last few years, much in the way it has cultivated its image as a counterintuitive purveyor of Isaac Mizrahi clothes or Michael Graves tea kettles, Target has been building itself into a tastemaker for books.

Through its book club, as well as a program it calls Bookmarked Breakout, both started in 2005, the company has highlighted largely unknown writers, helping their books find their way into shopping carts filled with paper towels, cereal and shampoo.

Target “can sell hundreds of thousands of copies of a book that is virtually unknown in the rest of the marketplace,” said Jacqueline Updike, director of adult sales at Random House, one of the world’s largest publishers.

By assembling a collection of books by unheralded authors, Target behaves more like an independent bookstore than like a mere retailer of mainstream must-haves (although, of course, Target sells its share of best-seller list regulars, like James Patterson and Janet Evanovich).

Target began its Bookmarked Club Pick and Breakout programs partly to convert “Target core guests into regular Target book shoppers,” said Jana O’Leary, a spokeswoman, in e-mailed responses to questions. Ms. O’Leary said that Target’s “core” book buyers were women, with a median age of 42 and median annual household income of $60,000. About half have completed college degrees, and some have children at home.

The books for both programs are chosen by a panel of Target employees who meet monthly to review submissions from publishers.

In a letter written for the Target edition of “The Wednesday Sisters,” Ms. Clayton connected Target with her main characters: “As women with relationships and jobs to tend to, dinners to cook, miles to run, and children to raise, where else would they go for sweatshirts, cookie pans and the alarm clocks that wake them up so they can write in the early-morning silence, before life intrudes?”

In an interview Ms. Clayton said she was more likely to go to Target herself for “teapots and toasters” and mainly bought books at local independents. Target, she figured, would expand the more typical audience for her novel. “Your book is being seen by people who aren’t necessarily there to buy books,” she said. “It makes you think that walk-by traffic is still selling books.”

Ms. de Rosnay, the author of “Sarah’s Key,” who lives in France, said she knew her paperback had a chance of much bigger sales when a friend sent her an iPhone photo of a shelf full of copies of her book at a Target. “That’s when I realized this was big — really big,” Ms. de Rosnay said.