Last week the news was abuzz on the revelation on The Smoking Gun that parts of James Frey’s bestselling memoir “A Million Little Pieces” may have been fabricated. Indeed, Internet searches for “james frey” were up 452% for the week ending 1/14/06 vs. the prior week, and searches for “a million little pieces” were up 293% in the same period. Hitwise Search Term Analysis shows that Amazon.com was the leading site receiving traffic from searches for “a million little pieces.”

The chart below shows the share of searches for the author and his newly controversial book that went to sites in the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds – Books category, which is of course dominated by Amazon.com. The October spike was due to James Frey’s appearance on Oprah’s book club show on October 26, 2005. It seems that whether the truth was embellished or not, people loved the book, and the controversy will only serve to sell more copies.