promotion tour six months before the novel's publication. She met with book retailers who, impressed with her presentation, bought large numbers of the book. As an article in The Age explains, "By the time it arrived in the bookstores, The Historian had already made the news several times". As soon as the book was published in June, Kostova went on a 15-city tour, including book signings and readings, which prompted further media reports on it. She appeared on ABC's Good Morning America on 28 June, and there were stories about the novel in USA Today, Entertainment Weekly and Newsweek. Kostova was billed as the next literary phenomenon, the next Alice Sebold or Susanna Clarke.The Historian was the first debut novel to land at number one on The New York Times bestseller list in its first week on sale, and as of 2005 was the fastest-selling hardback debut novel in U.S. history. The book sold more copies on its first day in print than The Da Vinci Code – 70,000 copies were sold in the first week alone.Gary Younge, "Bigger than Dan Brown" (original), The Guardian (18 July 2005). Retrieved 7 May 2009. Archived copy. As of the middle of August 2005, the novel had already sold 915,000 copies in the U.S. and had gone through six printings. (For comparison, according to Publishers Weekly, only ten fiction books sold more than 800,000 hardcover copies in the US in 2004.) Little, Brown and Company also released an edition of Dracula in September 2005 with an introduction by Kostova, thinking her readers would want to delve into the original novel after reading hers.Dracula (original). Amazon.com. Retrieved 28 May 2009. Archived copy. Kostova is one of the few female bestselling authors, but her popularity is unusual because it is founded on a literary novel. Reviews of the novel were "at best, mixed". Several reviewers noted that Kostova described the setting of her novel well; Laura Miller of Salon.com, for example, wrote that "Kostova has a genius for evoking places".Nancy Baker, "The Dracula Code?", The Globe and Mail (2 July 2005). LexisNexis (subscription required). Retrieved 7 May 2009. Malcolm Jones of Newsweek wrote that the novel was "strikingly fresh and unformulaic". Baker praised Kostova's prose, saying that it "has a leisurely grace". Francis Atkinson of The Age praised the "Gothic sensuality" of the novel. However, some thought the book was too long, or criticized Kostova's