Secret Daughter, a debut novel by an untested author, went supernova after just four days on the shelves at Costco By Scott Macdonald

It’s amazing what a little support from Costco can do for a writer’s career. When HarperCollins Canada published Toronto-born Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s debut novel, Secret Daughter, last March, its prospects were not good: the advertising budget was nil, and booksellers greeted it with shrugs. But then HarperCollins asked Costco’s book buyer, Catherine Bergeron, to look past the store’s best-seller bias and give the novel a shot. That was on a Tuesday. By Saturday, it was one of the top-selling titles in the country. Since then, the book—about an Indian woman forced to give up her daughter and the American couple that adopts the child—has been anointed a Heather’s Pick by Indigo, gone through more than a dozen printings, and sold 200,000-plus copies in Canada alone.

All this is doubly curious when you consider that the 40-year-old Gowda has been a U.S. citizen for the past five years. (She lives with her husband and two children in San Diego.) She sold the novel not to HarperCollins Canada, but to HarperCollins U.S. The Canadian arm initially intended to distribute the American edition, but when the Toronto sales office noticed Gowda’s Canadian roots, a paperback version was created for the domestic market. (Paperbacks are Costco’s preferred format and a factor in its decision to carry Secret Daughter before it went supernova.) In the much larger U.S. market, where the book has been available only as an expensive hardcover, sales have been comparatively modest: 10,000-odd copies to date.

Read the rest of this entry »