News updates about The Hunger Games & Mockingjay

Fans were thrilled last week when Scholastic revealed the title & cover art for the third & final book in Suzanne Collin’s Hunger Games trilogy — Mockingjay, due out August 24th.

Publisher’s Weekly has posted a great article featuring various news tidbits related to the series:

To date, in the U.S. and Canada there are over 800,000 copies of The Hunger Games in print, and over 750,000 copies of Catching Fire in print, for a combined total of more than 1.5 million.

The paperback edition of The Hunger Games comes out on July 6.

Scholastic Audio will release the audio recording of Mockingjay simultaneously on August 24.

Foreign rights to The Hunger Games have been sold into 38 territories to date, including, most recently, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia, Ukraine, and Albania.

Film rights for The Hunger Games have been optioned by Lionsgate, and Suzanne Collins is currently in the midst of writing the screenplay, as well as putting the finishing touches on Mockinjay.

The PW also writes about the building fan anticipation:

Anticipation—and speculation—have been building ever since fans closed the page on the cliffhanger ending of Catching Fire, the second in Suzanne Collins’s bestselling Hunger Games trilogy. What will happen in book three? And what will it be called? Though the plot twists are top-secret, the book’s title has just been revealed by Scholastic: Mockingjay. It will have a one-day laydown date of August 24, 2010, and a first printing of 750,000 copies. (The cover, and title, refer to the hybrid birds that are an important symbol—of hope and rebellion—throughout the books; the mockingjay appears on the jacket art for all three volumes in the series.)

Scholastic will not be distributing advance copies of Mockingjay, though it did create ARCs for the first two volumes. (In keeping with the embargo, media outlets won’t be receiving the book in advance either.) According to a Scholastic spokesperson, because this book, which concludes the series, is so highly anticipated, the publisher wanted to give fans the chance to discover the ending at the same time and prevent spoilers.

Read more here.

For the comments: Are you a fan of The Hunger Games? Tell us why!