This morning saw a veritable explosion in sales for one particular little book, originally released by Canongate in April. It’s now No 3 in the Amazon charts, rising by nearly 250,000% in the Movers & Shakers list. The book is Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives, and is a series of forty (very) short stories by a neuroscientist named David Eagleman.

This surge in sales is the result of a single Tweet by one of the country’s most famous Twitterers, Stephen Fry, in which he writes: “You will not read a more dazzling book this year than David Eagleman’s Sum. If you read it and aren’t enchanted I will eat 40 hats”. This has been re-tweeted by hundreds of Fry’s followers, and the impact is clearly visible on sales. In fact, such has been the increased interest from retailers that a major reprint of the book has just been confirmed to meet demand.

Further fuelling the rise in popularity was an interview with Eagleman this morning on BBC R4′s Today Program. The show also put up extracts from the book on their site and invited listeners to give their ideas, as well as making a special mention of it on the BBC Podcast Twitter account.

Sum has received a huge amount of support since publication, and will on the 12th November be the focus of a celebrity-packed event at the Southbank Centre. Readings have already been confirmed by Philip Pullman, Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave, Miranda Richardson and others. This follows a previous event curated by Brian Eno which took place at the Sydney Opera House in June, in which several of the ‘Sums’ were set to an original score by Eno.

You can see Stephen’s comments on www.twitter.com/stephenfry, and its impact by searching for ‘David Eagleman’ on www.twitter.com/search. Further details of the Southbank event can be found on their website, www.southbankcentre.co.uk. Extracts from the book and Radio 4 listeners’ reactions are available on http://bit.ly/today-sum.

Add your comment