hankyoreh

By Choi Jae-bong, Senior Staff Writer

Bolstered by strong sales in the United States, novelist Shin Kyung-sook’s “Please Look After Mom” is also setting new records in South Korea.

According to online book store Yes24, “Please Look After Mom” and its English translation were the top bestsellers of the day Friday in both its domestic and foreign books sections. Yes24’s Lee Ji-yeong said, “It marked the first time since our company was founded that both a book and its translation were the top bestsellers.”

The book is selling close to 1,200 copies a day, surpassing the greatest single day total of 950 copies when it spent nine weeks at the top of the bestsellers list from March 2009. Moreover, not only was the English translation the bestseller of the day, but it had been the bestseller of the week based on just three days of sales.

“As news reached South Korea that 100,000 first edition copies in the United States sold out in just one day and the book broke into Amazon’s list of its top 30 bestsellers, local readers were driven to buy it,” said Lee. “The foreign press has praised the translation for its care and beautifully-written prose, generating interest for the English translation, which drove it to No. 1.”

In the weekly bestseller rankings announced Thursday by the Korea Publishers Society, a collection of numbers from major bookstores nationwide, the book did very well, reaching sixth overall.

Meanwhile, the dominant analysis is that the novel’s success in the United States is due to concentrated buying by Korean-Americans and its universal appeal to non-Korean Americans. Particularly cited is the sudden increased interest in family values represented by the mother in a situation where families are falling apart due to the global financial crisis including in the United States, which could be called the home of neoliberalism. As of 12 p.m. Saturday, the novel was 19th on Amazon’s bestseller list.

“I understood the American publishing company was undertaking separate publicity and marketing efforts aimed at Korean-Americans, but the book could not have achieved what it has based on sales to Korean-Americans alone,” said Lee Gu-yong of KL Management, which is in charge of copyright sales of the novel. “Many found the book’s sentimentality and its distinctive narrative style employing the second-person ‘you’ both unusual and interesting. The reader reviews at Amazon were also uniformly good in an almost exceptional manner, spreading trust with other readers and seemingly expanding the reader base.”

“Before Haruki Murakami became a world-famous writer, the role of the Sakai Agency was very important, and so is the role of the agent for ‘Please Look After Mom’ in its success,” said Han Gi-ho, director of the Korea Publishing Marketing Research Institute. “The book’s story of a very Korean mother could elicit the sympathy of American readers because of the situation in the United States, where the family unit is shaking apart after the global financial crisis.”

“Our U.S. publisher, literature specialists Knopf, made a substantial bet by printing 100,000 first edition copies, so it seems the book has done well with high-end American readers,” said Jang Eun-su of Minumsa. “The novel's success has set the stage for other South Korean novelists to become noticed. Some South Korean writers have received a good response in Europe, but have received virtually no response in the American market, so preparations must be made to send out the next writer who will follow this success.”

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]