In which Young Thomasina fancies the citadel of professional reviewers being dealt yet another blow with the battering ram of bloggers, and receives her comeuppance for use of overextended metaphors

Lest we fully believe that one can only become a national bestseller via online word-of-mouth if you are leant some help from Amazon.com (as was Keith Donohue’s nevertheless snappy book The Stolen Child), let us examine the newest book that has taken the publishing industry by surprise and by storm. Diane Setterfield’s debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, has topped the U.S. Bestseller lists, once again despite a large amount of notice in the conventional press. It just warms the cockles of my book-loving blog-loving heart.

42-year-old Setterfield quit her job teaching French at Harrogate College six years ago, and began tutoring part-time instead, in order to give her time to bring her ideas for a novel to fruition. Diane and her husband Peter Whitall, an accountant, lived frugally in order to make ends meet while Setterfield scribbled notes and made plans for the novel’s story and shapes. A period of frustration in which she put the notes away was brought to a close by a creative writing class, and she began to compose the novel in earnest. Now, after over five years of scrimping, Setterfield finds herself an overnight millionaire.

The mystery, centered around a young antiquarian bookseller and an aging best-seller author who wants her biography written, edged out established authors such as Fredrick Forsyth, Jennifer Weiner, James Patterson and Anna Quindlen to surge to the top of the best-seller lists. Setterfield also holds title to being the first British novels whose debut hit number one in the United States since Nicholas Evans’ The Horse Whisperer in 1996—a book which had the significant boost of a pre-existing film deal.

Setterfield’s Cinderella story is precisely the kind about which all writers dream; with the book rights nabbed for £800,000 in the UK and more than £526,000 in the US, the promising author will now have the leisure to spend time doing precisely what she loves most: writing. “If you ask anyone who has ever thought of writing a book how they feel about getting their work published, they will tell you that nothing could be more thrilling,” Setterfield beamed. “Any serious writer would view it as an enormous privilege to be able to devote the best of their time to what they love and that is what I will now be able to do.”

One aspect of the Cinderella story is puzzling: the Faery Godmother only exists on one side of the Atlantic, and not the side where Setterfield herself lives. While it has sold over 70,000 copies in the U.S., last week it only sold 600 copies in the U.K. The fact that it has done so much better in the U.S. has begun to attract the attention of U.K. publications under headlines such as “British teacher becomes a literary sensation in the US.” The Times article suggests that blogging may be the cause of this discrepancy. “I suppose it’s a new form of word of mouth,” Setterfield said of the blog publicity.

But isn’t the blog community basically a global one? If blogs are responsible, why should they only have affected the bookbuying community in the U.S.? I tried to do more research, and found that opinions about the verity of blog-powered purchasing are divided. Sassymonkey at Blogher.com is both excited and credulous—and for good reason: she first encountered The Thirteenth Tale on a blog. Conversely, Rebecca Swain Vadne at the Orlando Sentinel uses one of my favourite words, ridonkulous, in assessment of the possibility.

I was somewhat relieved to discover on Galleycat.com (though Rebecca’s site, Shakespeare’s Coffee) that Barnes and Noble placed the story as their number one recommendation, and that Borders ran similar promotions. On the other hand, with due respect, I’m not quite sure I’d place the Power of Blogging all the way at Ridonkulous; other things may be at work here besides paid marketing, and perhaps Americans are simply more swayed by blogs or more attentive to them. Or perhaps, as Galleycat suggests, “American people can only take one new thing per year,” and this fall, it’s The Thirteenth Tale.

In the end, however, I heard about this book on a blog. Unlike The Stolen Child, which attracted me via the patented Sell-to-Thomasina-by-Quoting-Yeats promotional scheme, and which I read utterly oblivious to the vast internet marketing campaign, I came by The Thirteenth Tale through precisely the forum which may have made it a success. And now I am planning to go out and obtain a copy, not to vindicate my Blogging Hubris (see comeuppance, above), but because it sounds like a novel for people who love books. Look for a review sometime after I make it through my current stack.