THE CAREER NOVELIST
Announcements like "100,000 copy first printing" are ... well, let's
not call them lies, exactly; rather, let us think of them as plans,
hopes, good intentions ... or maybe as that useful old publishing
guff, "an expression of our enthusiasm."
Okay, lies. Ad budgets have a way of evaporating at the last
moment, especially when orders are lower than expected. An author
tour can become a single trip to the local Barnes & Noble. And first
printings... well, everyone in the business knows that those are
only a promotional gimmick. Real first printings are based upon
early orders. One hundred thousand copies? That could be whittled
down to half that number. Rarely does the figure go up.
Of much more interest to me is the ship-in (see above). While it
is not a perfect forecast of a book's performance, it is more con-
nected to the real world than that "big first printing."
Ten Weefo on the New York Times Best-seller List! Whoa, baby, that
author must be getting rich, huh? Richer than most, to be sure.
But how rich is rich, exactly? The truth is that what puts a book on
the list is not sales but the rate of sales-, that is, not how much a book
is selling (in total), but how fast it is selling. Also, the list is a rela-
tive measure of books against one another. The top-of-the-list rate of
sales is many times that at the bottom of the list, and the August list
probably represents greater sales overall than the January list.
And Christmastime? Forget it. The book industry does 25 percent
of its business between Thanksgiving and Christmas. )ust try to get
on the list during the holidays! Only megasellers need apply in
December.
FORECASTING THE FORECAST
What will the numbers of the future be? Will that old standard,
sales, make a comeback? Will we need to understand algorithms?
Some observations: bookstores cannot shelve every title that is
published. With fifty thousand titles coming out annually, that
would be impossible. Even in the more limited arena of trade
books—that is, consumer books that one would expect to find in a
bookstore—there is not enough room. We have a glut of titles.
That means competition... fierce, back-stabbing competition.
The prize? Shelf space; the opportunity to exhibit your books to the