The event book of 2015, The Lost Bible by Igor Bergler got closer to 51,000 sold copies, Rao publishing House informs.
“The Lost Bible” set and broke record after record. After setting a first pre-sale record, the biggest in Romania’s history, over 10,000 copies, then the sale record in the first weekend after the book’s release in libraries- 3,200 sold copies, the novel also became the most sold book at the 22nd edition of Gaudeamus Book Fair, with over 1,600 sold copies. Also here, those 125,000 visitors of the fair chose “The Lost Bible” as the most desired book of the 2015 edition. The book got by 20,000 Facebook fans, which is also unprecedented in Romania.
Record sales followed in Christmas, with the book exceeding 50,000 sold copies right after the New Year’s Eve, and now Bergler’s novel ranks as the best-sold book by a Romanian author in the past 20 years.
“We should not forget that in Romania, a book by a domestic author is rarely beating 5,000 copies. And if it gets there, it becomes bestseller. It’s very difficult to compare with the sales before 1989, for back then books used to be printed in huge amounts and the sales were sort of controlled. Anyway, we cannot talk on a market which was not free. And regarding the sales in the first years after the Revolution, we don’t have controllable figures that we can count on (…) Anyway, so many copies sold so quickly are rare also for famous authors of foreign bestsellers (…),” Ovidiu Enculescu, Rao general manager said.
According to the author, the secret of the success clings to several factors. “Firstly, we have an exceptional novel, a spearhead of this genre which hasn’t been approached in Romania so far. The graphic conditions are exceptional; there is also the unprecedented marketing campaign in Romania, with a related investment, an excellent distribution countrywide and last, but not the least, it’s a very likeable book that readers are recommending to one another. This snowball is called <Word of mouth> in marketing and is equally responsible for the book’s fulminatory success,” the author argues.
‘The Lost Bible’ was translated in English by Jean Harris, while waiting for its international editor. Rao publishing house will also launch the book on Amazon.com and in e-book format for Kindle and ibooks.
At the same time, the publishing house is informing that Igor Bergler’s next book, “Lincoln’s Last Secret” will be even more spectacular than the first one, with many surprises in store for book avids. It is going to be released in the autumn of this year.
Reviewer Mihai Iovanel on ‘The Lost Bible’: “beside the agreeable part that Bergler offers his thriller a Romanian component through Vlad the Impaler pattern, the book proves to be even more intelligent and thrilling than it would have seemed following ‘a wise non-reading’. In brief, it’s the best thriller ever written by a Romanian author.”
At the same time, art critic Pavel Susara says that “we deal with a unique book, not only in the Romanian literature. It’s a book that can resembles Tarantino’s movies (…) It’s not a book flattering the consumer literature, the literature that is fostering the boudoir mysteries or the haircut salons ones, as Dan Brown did for instance (…)”.