‘Suddenly, It Was Everywhere’: Why Some Books Become Popular Overnight | books

THere is a certain kind of literary déjà vu that sometimes strikes. Seemingly out of nowhere, the same book starts popping up across multiple social media feeds. On the bus, you’ll discover two versions of the same title in one day. A friend says: “Have you read this yet?” and you reply: “Someone was just telling me about it the other day.”

These are sleeper strikes that seem to materialize without warning. It’s not stacked high in the new release schedules. They are books that, for one reason or another, have fallen back from their original timelines and found a second, often more powerful, life.

For a long time, the life cycle of a book has followed a similar ritual: the buzz of publication week, some reviews and appearances at festivals, and then a slow fade out unless awards are wreathed. But today’s dormant successes emerge from an alchemical mix of influences: Internet enthusiasm, translation, determination, political temperament, bookseller endorsement, and sheer serendipity.

Perhaps the most notable example from this year is the huge success of Jacqueline Harpman’s dystopian feminist novel I Never Knew Men. Originally published in French in 1995, it tells the story of a girl imprisoned underground with 39 other women, raised in captivity, then released into a barren post-apocalyptic landscape, and must try to make sense of it. It was translated into English in 1997 and was a notable failure in both markets. The English version was left to languish under the (certainly worse) title Lady of Silence, and international sales were at a rate of one or two per year.

Three decades later, the book has sold 275,000 copies worldwide this year, an increase of 143% on 2024. The book has sold 75,000 copies in the UK alone – more than double last year’s figure. It has been featured on Service95’s must-read lists, a book club and website created by Dua Lipa, and is one of the most trending titles on TikTok.

Its rise was a combination of luck and strategy. Its publisher, Vintage Classics, reissued the novel in English in 2019 after a savvy executive introduced it. The new edition has been repackaged, re-translated, and its original title restored.

Part of its success was timing. As Nick Skidmore, Vintage’s publishing director, explains, the reissue comes “in the wake of Trump’s inauguration… at a time when The Handmaid’s Tale and dystopia in general were popular.” Harpman’s book exploits this confusion: “A lot of people didn’t know where we were, or how we got here, and they looked to fiction to help explain it,” Skidmore says.

A big factor was also getting it retranslated. Ross Schwartz, the book’s translator, was keenly aware that her first translation in the 1990s was missing the narrator’s voice. Much of it was written in esoteric literary language, which did not resonate with the experience of the protagonist.

“I realized that I had translated the words, not the sound,” she says. It stripped away the “Latin words” that raised the prose to a highly formal register and restored the abbreviations that were completely missing.

In fact, a surprising number of recent hits have been translated. Translation can unlock a book’s potential, giving it a new voice and thus a new audience.

Perfection – Vincenzo Latronico’s lean, satirical novel about an ambitious creative-class couple who document (and slowly distort) their lives through the pursuit of aesthetic “perfection” – is one example. Published in Italian in 2022, the book was not a huge success at home; This phenomenon did not begin until it was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in English in February of this year (translated by Sophie Hughes). Suddenly, the book was everywhere, appearing in every carefully photographed bedside pile and library of April Reads, becoming the unofficial book on Instagram – and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Latronico recalls that in the first weeks after the book came out in English, his publisher sent him an Instagram story from “a famous literary figure recommending my book.” His publisher told him that Fitzcarraldo was an audience he “doesn’t normally reach.” He describes the strange experience of reading it mostly in translation. He says of Hughes’s translation: “I honestly think the English translation is better than the Italian version.” This produced a “strange situation” where “the majority of readers are not from the culture to which I belong.”

He believes this cultural distance is partly why the book became so popular in London and New York. For Italians or those who live outside Europe’s big cities, the lifestyle he depicts is “not common, it’s completely foreign.” To Berliners, it seemed all too familiar. But for readers of the English-speaking creative class, it hits the sweet spot of recognition and distance. “It has now sold more copies in certain bookshops in London than in the whole of France, for example,” Latronico says.

Not all hit songs are dark or satirical, some are driven by a desire for refuge. Picador publisher Mary Mount believes the global rise of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold series (translated by Geoffrey Trousselot) is rooted in escapism. The books, set around a small café in Tokyo where customers can travel through time for a single cup of coffee, have built a loyal cult following since publication, selling worldwide and steadily spreading through online communities of readers.

“Kawaguchi has created a world that she wants to return to,” Mount says. These are “warm and cozy” titles – exactly what many readers want. The series has now sold over a million copies worldwide, and Before the Coffee Gets Cold has been the best-selling Japanese book in translation for three consecutive years. Sales quadrupled in 2022, partly due to the TikTok trend of people reading the series with coffee, which helped boost sales in international markets, according to its publisher.

The design and nature of the books are important here as well. In the online video-first ecosystem, creators know that a beautiful cover will attract clicks, and attractive covers are also more likely to land in Instagram feeds. “They are beautiful printed books in both hardback and paperback, and we invest a lot in the look and feel of the books, because readers are offering their copies and discussing the books on social media,” Mount says.

The role of Fitzcarraldo’s trademark — Klein’s simple blue packaging — was undeniable in Perfection’s success as well. “The book benefited greatly from Fitzcarraldo’s fame and reputation,” Latronico says. Their titles often serve as a badge of cultural capital on social media and in handbags, an irony not lost on Latronico. “The book is about what looks good on Instagram, and it becomes something that looks good on Instagram itself.”

The rebranding of “I Who Never Knew Men” shows this process in action. Skidmore says Anna Morrison’s new cover is “quite iconic” and helped position the book as a “weird, wonderful, beautiful novel”.

It’s tempting to think of sleeper hits as miraculous accidents: a lone reader praising a book, then a chain reaction of friends pressing copies into their hands. But the mechanism underneath is increasingly deliberate.

Libraries play a crucial role, says Pia Carvalho, head of books at Waterstones. When a book starts to create buzz, Waterstones can “make sure we’re part of the conversation”, by putting it in more stores. Sometimes, she notes, “this can start with a single individual, sometimes with great pre-publication fanfare,” but in both cases, “booksellers are now increasingly good at harnessing that.”

Meanwhile, in recent years, a number of publishing houses and publications have created programs dedicated to discovering forgotten classics. “There’s an art to it,” Skidmore says. “You have to bring back the right book at the right time. My desk is full of lists of books that I know can and should find new readers, but they all need to wait patiently for the right set of circumstances—be it a publicity hook, a design trend, or an endorsement from celebrities or influencers—to come along or be successfully conceived.”

If there’s one constant in these stories, it’s unpredictability. “There’s no formula for success,” Schwartz says. Latronico is similarly skeptical. “I had no expectations when I wrote this book,” he admits. “I try to remember that this kind of thing doesn’t happen twice.”