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Book Sales Down in Post-Election Weeks

December 1, 2016

Pigs next to stacks of booksNovember is the cruelest month, breeding misery for booksellers.

The week of November 20, 2016 marked the third consecutive week in which, since the election, book sales have dropped nationwide, Publishers Weekly reports. Print book sales fell by 1%, compared to the same week last year.

Publishers hope that a turnaround is near given the success of two new books from prominent voices in politics: Bernie Sanders and Megyn Kelly. Kelly’s Settle for More reached the top of the adult nonfiction bestsellers list within the first week of its publication, while Sanders’s Our Revolution reached the third spot.

In related news, the election and other related events could have caused a dip in the number of positive words we’re all using, too. Researchers have long tried to understand what causes a “positive linguistic bias”—which describes a tendency to use more positive words than negative words—and a study published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that people’s preference for positive words varies with overall national mood, The New York Times reports.

Rumen Iliev, a coauthor of the paper and psychology researcher at Stanford University, told the Times that the results of the study mark just the beginning of research into the relationship between positive linguistic bias and national mood.

“We hope that our research will generate novel research which will use both different dictionaries and different databases,” he said.

 

Photo Credit: Unsplash.


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