Author Joel C. Rosenberg has done it again. His newest novel, The Third Target, which released only three weeks ago, has earned inclusion on every major national best-sellers list, including The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journal, and The USA Today.
The Third Target‘s inclusion on The New York Times list marks the ninth time that a Rosenberg fiction novel has made the prestigious best-sellers list, in addition to five of his books making the non-fiction list.
The Third Target, a fictionalized account of a New York Times foreign correspondent learning that ISIS had captured a cache of weapons inside Syria, debuted at No. 4 on the Publishers Weekly fiction best-sellers list (PW uses actual book sales per Nielsen BookScan) for the week ending Jan. 11, 2015, and cracked the top 10 again this past week at No. 10.
The Third Target’s best-seller rankings on national fiction lists are as follows:
- Publishers Weekly (based on BookScan numbers): debuted at No. 4 on Jan. 12, 2015; No. 10 on Jan. 19
- The Wall Street Journal (based on BookScan but includes children’s books): debuted at No. 6 on Jan. 12, 2015
- The New York Times (based on its own proprietary formula): debuted at No. 14 on Jan. 25, 2015
- The USA Today (includes nonfiction and fiction soft and hardcover): debuted at No. 21 on Jan. 8, 2015
The sales of Rosenberg’s books were buoyed by an extensive marketing and PR campaign. Rosenberg was featured in interviews on FOX News‘ Huckabee, CBN’s The 700 Club, and Sean Hannity’s nationally syndicated radio show. The book was advertised on such shows as Rush Limbaugh’s top-rated national radio show, The Drudge Report, theblaze.com, World Net Daily, foxnews.com, Sean Hannity, and CBN’s The 700 Club.
In addition to Rosenberg’s media appearances, he also spoke about the book and current events in the Middle East at the following churches: Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas; Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California; Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa in Santa Ana, California; Green Acres Baptist Church in Tyler, Texas; and Calvary Baptist Church in New York City, New York.
Rosenberg is the New York Times best-selling author of eight novels—The Last Jihad, The Last Days, The Ezekiel Option, The Copper Scroll, Dead Heat, The Twelfth Imam, The Tehran Initiative and The Damascus Countdown—and five nonfiction books, Epicenter, Inside the Revolution, Implosion, Israel at War, and The Invested Life, with nearly 3 million copies sold.
The Ezekiel Option received the Gold Medallion award as the “Best Novel of 2006” from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. Rosenberg is the producer of two documentary films based on his nonfiction books.