Tell Mrs. Levitt Everything’s All Right

Last month, Levitt blogged about how his mother would be disappointed to find that Freakonomics had fallen off the N.Y. Times best-seller list.

It’s true, we fell off the list after something like 77 weeks. But that wasn’t the end of the story.

Now we’ve climbed back on the list. How’d this happen?

Pretty simple, really. There were at least two reasons we fell off:

1. There were a ton of big-time non-fiction books released in the fall.
2. We chose to publish a revised and expanded version of Freakonomics.

While our publisher did a great job of transitioning from the original edition to the new one, there was an inevitable supply problem: if a bookstore ran out of Freakonomics a month or two before the new edition was coming out, they could either a) order some more of the original edition and then return the unsold copies once the new edition came or b) just wait until the new edition came.

Apparently a lot of bookstores chose b). Which meant that for several weeks it wasn’t always easy to find a copy of Freakonomics to buy, which meant that we fell off the Times list. But now we’re back and fully stocked, even at Costco, which sells a ton of books.

Hopefully now that we’ve made it back onto the Times list, we can turn our attention to setting this record.