Top Selling Sports Books of 2010

Darren Rovell just tweeted about the Top Sports Books of 2010. Don't plan on writing the next great best-selling sports book. That's a tough road.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/39688242

 

I'm guessing the days of sportswriters and columnists getting $50K-$100K for books are a thing of the past, unless you're a very select few.

 

I didn't realize Mike & Mike had a book out. Can't believe they couldn't sell enough books to fill a football stadium given their platform.

 

It's very, very, very, very hard to sell sports books. Very hard. The problem is that the target audience are not book readers.

 

Just found this about the Brees book. Don't write about a current athlete.

http://www.tyndale.com/news/000000000179/Drew-Brees-Memoir-Hits-Best-Seller-Lists

The lofty rankings on the various best seller lists puts Brees’s Coming Back Stronger in elite company as one of the best-selling biographies or autobiographies about an athlete still playing his sport. Its debut at No. 3 on the primary New York Times hardcover, nonfiction list was the highest appearance on the list by an active NFL player since Bo Jackson’s Bo Knows Bo reached No. 2 in 1990. Since 1970, it marked only the eighth time that a current athlete in one of the major four sports (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) reached at least No. 3 on the list. That list includes the following: Jackson’s Bo Knows Bo; For the Love of the Game: My Story by Michael Jordan and Mark Vancil (1998); Bad as I Wanna Be by Dennis Rodman with Tim Keown (1996); The Boz by Brian Bosworth with Rick Reilly (1988); McMahon! by Jim McMahon with Bob Verdi (1986); Balls by Graig Nettles and Peter Golenbock (1984); and Ball Four by Jim Bouton (1970).

 

Best selling sports books of 2011

10. Shit I made up - Mitch Albom
9. Ralph Macchio Ramblings - Bill Simmons
8. Marley and Me II - Michael Vick
7. Shawshank Redempion II - Urban Meyer
6. Where my bitches at? - Tiger Woods
5. Liliputian Rambles - Mike Lupica
4. Great, incredibly well-written book on subject nobody other than him cares about - Joe Posnanski
3. Smelling Coach K's farts - John Feinstein
2. Wow, 10 years ago I really wrote great stuff - Rick Reilly
1. Who wants to see my cock? - Brett Favre (with Peter King) a coffee table book.

 

I actually think S.L. Price is the author of No. 4.

 

I don't know whose mistake it would be - Nielsen perhaps - but there's no way Simmons' book shouldn't be on there. The No. 10 book sold 27,000 copies. Forget sports, at one point it was the top-selling nonfiction book.

 

The Simmons book came out in October of 2009. It's sold 162,000 copies, including 26,000 this year.

There are probably a few books that would be on this list that you could categorize as sports-related titles that may not be categorized as a sports book by BookScan. Tony Dungy's The Mentor Leader comes to mind.

 

Thanks for the explanation and numbers. Perhaps Rovell should then ask Nielsen for numbers from September 09 through September 2010, so it's a full year. Especially since a lot of big releases come in the fall and sell a ton of copies out of the gate, like the Book of Basketball.

 

It's been universally panned. The fact that they got 45K is impressive.

And almost all of the books there are either pretty off-the-beaten-path (Born to Run) or about well-known subjects that have been written about countless times before (Mays).

 

Is Rovell saying Born to Run is the best book he's ever read, or the best sports book he's ever read?