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Scanning the Future
I know that this is climbing onto my milk crate in the Commons one more time, but the beginning of the season always sets me to thinking about the cynical use the Industry makes of numbers these days.
I’ve had agents tell me that when they pitch an author’s next book, the first thing many editors do is check the sales numbers on the previous ones and use that to determine whether this is an author to take to the editorial board — or even to take back to the editorial board.
A few years ago, I sat at a meeting in Manhattan and watched as a sales manager looked around beneath him, lifting one foot and then the other, with our author’s previous sales figures winging in the air above his shoulder as he said, oh so cleverly, “I thought maybe a zero or two had fallen onto floor.”
The Sales Director followed up with, “So, why are we publishing this writer again?”
Something similar happens at the desks of some booksellers these days. Of course individual bookstores have always been able to access sales history for an author in their store, but now more stores are stocked by fewer buyers.
There are so many manuscripts out there and so many books published each year that everyone in the Industry needs a way to winnow down the harvest. And acting as though past sales figures are predictive is a convenient means to going forward.
But there was a time when literary careers grew and developed along with an author’s readership. Famously, John Irving has said that if he began writing now, he’d never get to The World According to Garp, which was several novels into his career. Richard Ford comes to mind here, too. And, more recently, I believe Sara Gruen found her acclaim with her third novel. Examples are hardly difficult to find—what were the initial sales of Toni Morrison’s first two novels?
But increasingly often these days, when scanned sales of first or second books are used as though they could predict the performance of the author’s newest effort, careers can end.
Of course booksellers and acquisitions editors are all in search of the lesser gamble. But is it a big step to worry that this use of statistics, even if the statistics are accurate and true, casts a long shadow over the future of literary writing?
— Fred Ramey
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