the mysteries of the market

In its business section last Sunday, the New York Times lavished a great deal of attention on the crapshoot that is the book publishing business (though writer Shira Boss was way less than flattering about the business acumen of publishing’s many brilliant practitioners, as Michael Cader pointed out in yesterday’s Publishers Lunch [registration required]):

You’ve probably already seen the latest installment in the NYT’s standing program to demonstrate to their readers that book publishers are idiots and formed plenty of your own opinions, but I thought this little note said it best:”The editor of the Sunday Business section is under contract to Random House and did not edit this article.”And it shows. Good idea for freelance writers: Pitch expose to NYT asserting opposite thesis, that publishers are interrogating readers to find out “what they want” in their books and forcing authors to write to market. I guarantee you’ll make Page 1 instead of just the business section.

That’s kinda inside baseball, though.

Now comes David Blum to examine (forlornly) why a particular novel that he loved, Then We Came to the End (which I happened to mention here), didn’t become a bestseller and didn’t make a mark on the culture.

It’s hardly fair to label “Then We Came to the End” a failure. The book’s publisher, Little Brown, says it has shipped 50,000 copies. It’s in its fourth printing, and still selling well. That’s a goal rarely achieved by any writer, let alone a debut novelist. Its smart yet realistic editor, Reagan Arthur, accurately describes “Then We Came to the End” as “slow-developing but genuine success.” The book has already returned a profit for its publisher, has been optioned by HBO Films (with Mr. Ferris attached to write the script), and has come closer than most to hitting that ever-shrinking bull’s eye of best-sellerdom.

But no one could possibly call the novel a national sensation. And its mid-range sales figures seem especially odd in light of the industry’s recent hand-wringing over the elimination of book-review sections in newspapers, where Mr. Ferris’s book did dominate. Two weeks ago, picketers actually marched in front of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to protest the removal of Teresa Weaver, the paper’s book review editor. Others have howled about publications being gforced to move their book coverage to the Web. The Chicago Tribune’s book review section, once a part of the paper’s high-circulation Sunday paper, has been relegated to the tiny Saturday edition. No less a novelist than Richard Ford decried the shift as “another erosive loss to the public’s cultural discourse.”

I’ll concede the point that book review sections don’t deserve to be whacked. But why doesn’t discourse result in sales? If Mr. Ford is right, then shouldn’t smart, alert readers have been lining up to buy the Ferris novel? Something doesn’t compute.

Indeed, something doesn’t compute. Blum goes on to make some good arguments—namely, that review attention isn’t enough to move copies of a book and that a title no one can remember is a definite black mark against a book. (Rules for Old Men Waiting, a marvelous novel by Peter Pouncey published a couple of years ago, suffered the same fate as Then We Came to the End: it did well, but not as well as it should have. It had bad title for the business climate in which it was published. Oh well.).

Sarah at GalleyCat begs to differ with Blum; Ferris’s book made the extended list, she points out.

First is Blum’s question as to why the book “did not become a New York Times bestseller”: Sure, it didn’t appear on the print list, but came very close - hitting #19 on the April 18th extended list. …

[N]o wonder [the book's editor] Reagan Arthur “got depressed” at Blum’s questioning when the book did fairly well and turned a profit - and more importantly, probably earned out long before publication because buying world rights yielded foreign sales fruit.

If you know what the “extended list” is, you’re inside baseball. If you think making #19 on the extended list is a good result for a book that was featured on the cover of the New York Times book review, you are definitely not deep enough inside baseball. You’re just a bitchy David Blum hater, because he “so happlessly ran the Village Voice into the ground.” (Right. In the half dozen or so months that he was there.)

David Blum’s point is that even the fiction that is highly touted by the alleged know-nothings of the publishing industry (see Michael Cader’s remarks above) and pumped by the New York Times Book Review is not making a dent in the cultural life of America. It’s not getting traction.

That, dear GalleyCat, is the awful truth for those of us who love books. Deal with it.