How “The Girl on the Train” Became a Runaway Success

If there's one word that sums up the publishing success story of this year's "it" book, The Girl on the Train, it is "speed." We've never seen any other debut novel achieve this kind of velocity on Goodreads:

• The Girl on the Train built up more Want to Read shelvings pre-publication than any other debut novel in Goodreads' history.
• It's been far and away the most searched-for book on Goodreads in 2015, with four times as many searches as the closest contender.
• Flipping the behavior we see for a typical book, more people have been marking it as "Read" than people adding it to their Want to Read shelves for months.

Kate Stark, Riverhead Books Marketing Vice President, told us "Goodreads played a major role in helping The Girl on the Train break out to early success. We knew that getting early reviews from Goodreads members would be critical. Once the word of mouth started and readers got excited about the book, the social side of Goodreads amplified the buzz it was getting to astounding levels."

It's the bullet train of books. But what catapulted the book into New York Times bestseller status so quickly? What made it the kind of debut book sales story the industry sees only every few years? With the book passing the epic 3 million copies sold milestone, we thought it was a good time to dig into the data on Goodreads to find out.

The first thing we discovered is that this is a story of how the passion of influential readers helped build that all-important early buzz. It's also a story of how the twin trends of social media and our increasing time on mobile devices helped translate that initial buzz into a word-of-mouth sensation at record speeds. With the growth in mobile, it's not surprising that more and more people are discovering, buying, reading and/or discussing books on their mobile devices. At Goodreads, more than 50% of our traffic comes from mobile (people using our iOS and Android apps, or using our mobile website). Almost half of the activity you see below happened on mobile devices, which was clearly a significant factor in how quickly buzz about the book spread.

Further contributing to the success of the book is the fact that interest in The Girl on the Train has been sustained. Look at the graph below and you'll see that thousands of people have been adding The Girl on the Train to their Goodreads shelves every day since late December.



Tracing the break out of The Girl on the Train

The Girl on the Train first came to our attention in September 2014, almost four months before it was published, when one of top reviewers, Karen, wrote a rave review. You can see the spike in Goodreads members adding the book to their Want to Read shelves after reading the review on the left of the graph below.



That initial round of interest from a trusted, influential member of the community led the book to briefly become a trending book on Goodreads by pushing it up our Popular Books lists and that helped more people discover the book.

Karen had received one of the 4,000 Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) that the publishers, Riverhead Books, had sent out to booksellers, readers and book critics in the media. (Sending out ARCs is a key part of the marketing by publishers and authors to build buzz around their books in the build-up to publication.)

We talked with Jynne Martin, Riverhead Books Publicity Director, and she told us that ARCs were particularly important for this book: "The whole Riverhead team fell in love with The Girl on the Train. People were reading it under the table in meetings! It's that compulsive. We knew that the key to helping this debut book break out was to get it into as many people's hands as possible. The story would take it from there."

To help kickstart awareness with Goodreads members, Riverhead Books ran two Goodreads giveaways in October 2014 offering members the chance to win one of 50 copies of the book. Almost 2,400 members entered and you can see the spikes in people adding the book to their shelves as a result (and their friends seeing the news in their Goodreads updates feed about people entering the giveaway and deciding to add the book as well).

December is where all of Riverhead's pre-publication work starts to pay off. There's clearly a groundswell of buzz that has built up as the number of searches on Goodreads are increasing (the green area in the chart shows the number of people who are adding the book to their shelves after searching for it). Media coverage is starting to come out, Riverhead's social media campaign is kicking into gear, and more Goodreads members are posting their reviews after reading their ARCs.

For the Riverhead team, seeing this surge of activity on Goodreads and the pre-orders coming in from booksellers further reinforced their confidence that The Girl on the Train had the potential to be a major bestseller. They decided to ramp up their advertising plans, and booked additional media interviews for the author, Paula Hawkins (who flew in from England).

January 2015 — Publication Month!



Publication date for The Girl on the Train was January 13, 2015. A flurry of rave reviews from major media outlets came out the week beforehand, increasing daily searches on Goodreads significantly. And thanks to the social network effect of Goodreads, word-of-mouth about the book grew exponentially as people discovered the book from updates by friends on Goodreads.

As a result of the huge numbers of people who had added The Girl on the Train to their Want to Read shelves and the high average rating from the pre-publication reviews, the book shot straight to the top of our Hot Books of January list and it was featured in our general newsletter and in our New Releases email (which each go out to 31 million readers). This caused a dramatic spike in people adding to the book to their Goodreads shelves in the week before publication.

Marketing around the book also included advertising, and campaigns on Goodreads before and after publication created spikes in interest (see the circled peaks in the visual). Not highlighted on the graph are the two additional giveaways that Riverhead ran in January that drove more than 5,000 entries — another sign of how much interest and demand had built up around this book.

Immediately post-publication, it's clear that the book has already achieved mainstream awareness — it's a rarity for a debut novel to get this popular this quickly. There are huge numbers of people searching for it on Goodreads and adding it to their shelves. More media coverage was coming out (we could only show some of the highlights in the visual) and people were talking about it as "the next Gone Girl."

Just two weeks after publication, news broke that The Girl on the Train had hit the number one spot in the New York Times Bestseller List. It's the kind of news that makes a book even more popular and is the beginning of The Girl on the Train reaching an even wider audience. You can see the huge spike in searches as the news comes out and the searches stay high in the days following. The book was about to go from bestseller to phenomenon — the kind of book that comes along maybe once or twice a decade.

Other influencers started talking about the book. For example, Stephen King — who has kept many a reader awake at night — was the first celebrity to tweet about the book, sharing that it had kept him up most of the night.



What's also very different about The Girl on the Train from other books is the speed at which people have been reading it. This wasn't a book people bought and then added to the pile on the nightstand. The Girl on the Train had become part of the zeitgeist — it was a conversation topic. And to be part of the conversation, you had to read it first, which people did in droves. You can see from the chart below that more people have been reading it than adding it to their Want to Read shelves for months, which is highly unusual for a book.



Many things have to come together to launch a book onto the bestseller list, but what The Girl on the Train shows us is:

• Word of mouth has always been crucial in the publishing world, but now the growth of social media and mobile device adoption can help break out a book at an unprecedented speed.
• Getting a book into the hands of influential readers months in advance of publication is more important than ever. While speed is the name of the game once buzz has built up, it takes time for that initial buzz to develop.
• It takes multiple marketing tactics to promote a book. We've been able to share only highlights from a very successful campaign by Riverhead. Each of the tactics helped amplify the others.

Ultimately, though, at the heart of this story is a book that many readers have found "gripping," "a fantastic ride," and "a tightly woven mystery with painful secrets and startling truths revealed along the way." It's the kind of book readers can't help telling their friends about.

How did you first hear about The Girl on the Train?