Did you read the book about a girl on a train? It’s possible you read the wrong book. From the Wall Street Journal:
Alison Waines didn’t expect her two-year-old psychological thriller to hit it big.
But it suddenly took off this year, selling tens of thousands of copies, climbing to the top of Amazon.com Inc.’s U.K. and Australian charts for e-book downloads, and becoming a topic of discussion in book clubs.
“I’m making more money than I ever have before,” said the former psychotherapist.
The plot twist? Many of Ms. Waines’s readers bought the book, “Girl on a Train,” by mistake. They meant to buy “The Girl on the Train,” the best seller by Paula Hawkins that is being made into a movie starring Emily Blunt and Justin Theroux.
Nor are girl-on-train stories the only place this type of overlap can be seen and maybe there’s always been a bit of it, but on a large scale, it’s an e-book phenomena:
In 2013, when Stephen King published “Joyland,” there was a spike in e-book sales for Emily Schultz’s novel of the same name. Mr. King’s novel is a story about a boy working in an amusement park, while Ms. Schultz’s book, which came out in 2006, is about a boy and an arcade. Mr. King declined to comment. He previously said he was “delighted” for Ms. Schultz and planned to buy her novel.
Mr. King’s “Joyland” wasn’t available in e-book format at the time, but Ms. Schultz’s was. E-books made up the majority of the sales of her novel. “I don’t think you can ever make that error in a bookstore,” she said.
These two examples were unintentional mix-ups. But sometimes there are other factors at work:
Other times, titles are clearly designed to pay homage or grab a piece of a booming book’s sales. “The Girl with the Dove Tattoo,” “Girl with the Cat Tattoo” and “The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo” are all available for purchase. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” the Swedish crime novel by the late Stieg Larsson, has sold millions of copies.
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