The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist

The Sales Figure Myth

132 The Sales Figure Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A pet peeve of mine is the publishing industry’s obsession with sales figures. Time and again, I hear stories about how a publishing house won’t take on a book that an acquisitions editor likes because the author’s previous book sales weren’t up to snuff. Or, you’ll read about an author who was dumped by her publishing house because of previous sales figures.Why are past sales figures important? Bookstore chains base orders for a new novel primarily on the author’s previous sales figures. Let’s say Author X sold 5,000 copies of her first novel but then sold only 2,000 copies of her second novel. The chain bookstores look at those numbers and decide that even fewer copies of the third novel are likely to sell, so the chain orders fewer copies than they’d ordered for the author’s previous books, resulting in the publishing house doing a smaller print-​ run, which, in turn, pretty much guarantees even lower sales while possibly killing poor Author X’s career in the process. So, what’s wrong with this scenario? Bookselling is a business, after all, right? And doesn’t an author’s track-​ record accurately suggest an author’s trajectory? It’s a logical fallacy to assume that the author is the problem with sales while ignoring all of the other potential factors: publicity budgets ; subject matter of book; size of publisher; even world events. I know a few writers who had novels released on September 11, 2001. What do you think their sales figures looked like? I can name dozens of authors whose past sales did not reflect future sales. John Irving’s first three novels sold miserably. In fact, his second and third novels sold fewercopies than his first. By today’s standards, it’s likely that Irving’s career would have been over before he’d had a chance to publish his fourth book. What happened, however , was that Irving moved from Random House to Dutton for his fourth novel, The World According to Garp. Garp became not only a publishing phenomenon but the book that cemented John Irving’s reputation as one of today’s best-​ known writers. More recently, Lee Smith published with a commercial house for many years. Some of her books, most notably Oral History, sold well; others sold modestly. When her long-​ time editor died, Smith was dropped from the publishing house. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect Getting Published 133 that her more recent novels, which were not bestsellers, hadn’t sold up to the publisher’s expectations. After getting dumped by the big NewYork house, Smith sold her next novel,The Last Girls, to the much smaller publishing house Algonquin Books. The Last Girls became a NewYorkTimes bestseller that posted the sort of sales figures that I’m sure had her previous publisher gnashing their teeth with regret. And then there’s Kent Haruf. His first two novels sold modestly at best. Nine years passed between his second novel and his third, enough time for most publishers to officially declare an author dead. But Knopf took on his third novel, Plainsong, and launched a massive campaign for the book. I still remember booksellers at my local independent bookstore reading advance review copies of his book and talking about it long before it came out. The ARCs were as pretty as a new paperback, and from what I heard, the print-​ run for the ARCs alone would have made most authors drool. In other words, Knopf ignored Haruf’s previous book sales, determined to make something of a book that they believed in—and it worked. Plainsong was one of those novels that everyone spent the year talking about. Kent Haruf was fifty-​ six years old when the book was published. His dormant career was miraculously revived. And what about Cormac McCarthy? His career didn’t really take off until the publication of his sixth novel, All the Pretty Horses. More recently, there’s the story of Joe Meno. Meno published his first two novels with commercial houses and posted terrible sales figures . No one wanted his third novel. Thinking his career in the world of commercial publishing was dead, Meno decided to publish his book with Punk Planet Books, a brand-​ new, untested imprint of the small publisher Akashic.The novel was Hairstyles of the Damned, and it went on to sell a staggering...