Onyx Storm, the latest installment in the Empyrean romantasy series, sold 1,288,300 hardcovers (including both deluxe and standard editions) during its first week on sale, based on Circana BookScan figures. That’s the highest number of print sales for any adult title since the service started tracking book sales in 2004. (For comparison, the final title in the Harry Potter series sold 8.3 million copies in its first 24 hours on sale.)
The publisher, Entangled, reports total sales of 2.7 million copies for Onyx Storm during the first week; the entire series sold 12 million copies overall last year. Last year, the romantasy genre accounted for 30 million print sales, an increase of 50 percent over the previous year, according to Circana. Learn more in the New York Times (gift link).
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
