Critical Mass

Eat Pray Sell

By NBCC

Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg published a story on the phenomenon of former NBCC finalist Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, which sold roughly 100,000 copies in hardback but then took off in paper. Not long ago, in August!, the book had just passed the million copy mark. Well don’t turn your back. I had to run down sales figures this week for an end of the year story and it turns out “Eat Pray Love” is now closing in on the 4,000,000 copy in print mark—the rate of sale is staggering. Last week the book sold almost 86,000 copies at Barnes & Noble alone—numbers that boggle the mind.