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Andrew Klavan of the Daily Wire sells out first 2 printings of his holiday novel





Andrew Klavan is a contributor with the Daily Wire who broadcasts weekly from Nashville. He is an author of the books “The Great Good Thing,” “Werewolf Cop,” “Empire of Lies” and “True Crime.” His newest novel, “When Christmas Comes,” sold out its first two printings.Screenshot, Tyler Hummel / Main Street Nashville

Andrew Klavan is a contributor with the Daily Wire who broadcasts weekly from Nashville. He is an author of the books “The Great Good Thing,” “Werewolf Cop,” “Empire of Lies” and “True Crime.” His newest novel, “When Christmas Comes,” sold out its first two printings.Screenshot, Tyler Hummel / Main Street Nashville

Daily Wire contributor Andrew Klavan published his new novel “When Christmas Comes: A Yuletide Mystery” on Nov. 2 and has already sold out two printings. A third printing is being shipped to booksellers.

The book has reached No. 31 in sales on Amazon and No. 17 on Audible.

“We had a heartbreaking difficulty with the supply chain, which is just devastating the publishing industry,” Klavan said. “Our first and second printing sold out instantly. We had to start printing books on demand, and now a new printing has finally arrived. It’s been tense, but the sales have been great.”

COVID-19 restrictions have forced book printers to slow down their presses, which delayed production of the third printing.

Mysterious Press, the book’s publisher, didn’t believe that Klavan’s audience from “The Andrew Klavan Show” would purchase the book, he said.

“They loved the book,” Klavan said. “They said it was the best book they’d read in years. They just didn’t believe that my audience would turn up. It has been traditionally very hard to sell a conservative audience on fiction. They either like hard-hitting factual material or they like G-rated stuff. To say this was serious crime fiction that you will like, they were shocked that the audience turned out with the numbers it did. It was turning out of the store so fast they were calling me almost hysterical because they couldn’t keep the book in the store.”

 

 

“When Christmas Comes” is the story of a man with a mysterious past who now works as an English professor in the Midwest. He is asked by an old friend to investigate the case of a heroic Army ranger who has confessed to brutally killing his girlfriend and realizes it’s a much more complicated case than he’d imagined, as he searches for some kind of mitigating factor to keep the guy from being sent away for life.

Klavan fashioned the story as a dark but cozy Christmas mystery story, similar to “A Christmas Carol” or “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“It’s a very cozy Christmas setting, but it’s also a very dark underpinning,” he said. “One reviewer compared it to ‘Blue Velvet,’ that old movie where horrible things happen to a beautiful little town. This is not as grotesque as that, but it’s about darkness in human hearts, as well as Christmas.”

Klavan said he hopes to use the book’s success to launch a mystery series for his lead character Cameron Winter.

“I’ve been looking all my life for a character worthy of a series, and one of the problems I’ve had is most of my characters work out their core problem in the course of the story,” Klavan said. “I never wanted to continue more than three books in a trilogy. The minute I came up with Cameron Winter, I realized that this was a three-dimensional, complex, interesting character, and what was important to me was the books sell well enough so that they’d want a sequel and then a sequel after that. And that has already happened, and it’s a major victory in that sense.”

Klavan moved with the Daily Wire this year from Los Angeles. The company is now based in Nashville. He lives in Virginia and commutes weekly to record his podcast.

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