Mark Zuckerberg’s new book club might be quite the ticket for authors looking to move more units as the Facebook CEO’s first selection has experienced a huge sales boost.
As reported by Quartz, The End of Power by Moisés Naím shot up 44,363 spots in the Amazon book chart after being chosen by Zuckerberg, hitting as high as number 6 before selling out in paperback (the site has since managed to restock the title).
On top of that, the Kindle edition of the book jumped 191,057 spots to 29th place on the list of top-sellers, and the audiobook has topped the non-fiction genre in the iTunes store. Naím himself has since taken to Twitter to thank Zuckerberg for helping him achieve the latter.
“Delighted to see that audiobook of The End of Power is the #1 non-fiction bestseller in the iTunes store! Thank you Mark Zuckerberg,” posted the author.
Delighted to see that audiobook of The End of Power is the #1 non-fiction bestseller in the iTunes store! Thank you Mark Zuckerberg.
— Moisés Naím (@MoisesNaim) January 5, 2015
The project, dubbed ‘A Year of Books’, encourages participants to read a new title every two weeks that Zuckerberg himself will choose from suggestions. “My challenge for 2015 is to read a new book every other week – with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies,” the 30-year-old posted via his Facebook page. “I’m excited for my reading challenge. I’ve found reading books very intellectually fulfilling. Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today. I’m looking forward to shifting more of my media diet towards reading books.”
The project has been compared to ‘Oprah’s Book Club’, a segment on long-running talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show that invited viewers to read selected novels. Such was the segment’s success that being picked could turn little known books into best sellers
Released last year, The End of Power was dubbed by The Washington Post as, “Analytically sophisticated…[a] highly original, inter-disciplinary meditation on the degeneration of international power… The End of Power makes a truly important contribution, persuasively portraying a compelling dynamic of change cutting across multiple game-boards of the global power matrix.”