Terry Fallis, Novelist

This afternoon, on a lark, I checked back in with Bookmanager, where you can find all of the books in Canada ranked according to the previous week’s sales. Bookmanager provides the bestsellers lists for several major media outlets including CBC Books. I confess that in the weeks following the launch of my novels, I usually check the Bookmanager rankings every half hour or so! (Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration.) But Albatross has now been in bookstores since last August so I haven’t checked the numbers for quite a while. But I just did, filtering for “Canadian” and “fiction.” What a lovely surprise it was, in these bleak days of social distancing and self-isolation, to see that Albatross remains among the top twenty bestselling Canadian novels some seven months later (albeit at number twenty). Chuffed. Now back to our regularly scheduled hand-washing and crowd-avoidance. Stay safe, all.

Now that The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s much-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, has arrived, hot on the heels of Louise Penny’s latest blockbuster, I’m thrilled to be still in the bestseller mix. This is the top ten list of Canadian fiction bestsellers according to Bookmanager as of this day. It’s a veritable “who’s who” of CanLit with Margaret Atwood, Miriam Toews, Michael Ondaatje, Emma Donoghue, Esi Edugyan, Michael Crummy, Cherie Dimaline, and Louise Penny… and somehow I’m there, too. Surreal.

I’ve been monitoring Bookmanager these last few weeks to see how Albatross is faring in the “future releases, Canadian author, fiction” category. It’s been climbing the charts and recently took another bump up the list where it now sits as the fourth most-anticipated novel soon to be released by a Canadian author. I’m just using my blog as a place to record the novel’s journey for posterity’s sake. Just about four and half weeks to go before Albatross hits bookstores.