If you had any doubts about the continuing popularity of the Hunger Games franchise, sales of Sunrise on the Reaping should put those concerns to rest. I don’t think that the Panem Trilogy and prequels have any chance of supplanting the Harry Potter novels as the ‘Shared Text’ of the early 21st Century; I cannot think of a fictional work by a living writer, however, that has a greater following and appeal than does Suzanne Collins. Dan Brown may sell a lot of books but his work hasn’t become part and parcel with rebellions around the world:
Sales for Sunrise have been spectacular, not to mince words.
It’s #1 on Amazon.com, the world’s largest bookstore:
No big deal? According to one source, not only is Sunrise #1 today but it is the best selling book on Amazon for the first quarter of 2025 though it has only been in circulation for ten days.
It’s #1 by a large margin, too, at Publisher’s Weekly:
Hungry for More
Suzanne Collins has the #1 book in the country—by a factor of 10—withSunrise on the Reaping, her second Hunger Games prequel. It’s set 40 years after the events of the first prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which has sold 1.8 million copies in hardcover since its 2020 publication. (Two trade paper editions have sold another 860K copies.) Sunrise is a “brutal tale of compassion and rage,” per our starred review, “and a frank examination of propaganda and tragedy.”
The New York Times, per its Harry Potter Panic Policy that created in 2000 a separate Best Seller list for ‘Children and Young Adult Series’ to keep the Boy Wizard from dominating the Fiction category’s four top places, does not list Sunrise anywhere on its several Best Seller lists. Folded into the Hunger Games series, however, it is #1 on the YA Series list, and, though, invisible, I think can safely be assumed to be #1 in all hardcover fiction (Scholastic does not publish an e-Book simultaneously with its Hunger Games new releases.
Lionsgate no doubt is pleased and I suspect sales of Sunrise in various formats will continue strong, sustained by the aiding winds of periodic announcements of casting choices for the second prequel’s more important roles. Do you think they’ll put Jennifer Lawrence under a blonde wig to play her 16 year old mother, Astrid? The Gamesmakers have probably already made her an offer, though she’d be better suited to play Willamae Abernathy, Haymitch’s long-suffering Ma.
Even the conjecture stories will boost book sales, which, as of today, don’t need a lift. The legend continues to grow, as does the pressure for at least one more prequel, presumably the Plutarch Heavensbee story.
