Thursday
Dec132007
Sales realism
Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 10:29AM Earlier this week, the AP released a story on "Publishing's Hits and Misses in 2007", which sheds some light on book sales figures. Using data from Nielsen Bookscan (which is believed to track about 70% of book sales nationally) the AP reports that Dennis Johnson's Tree of Smoke has sold 34,000 copies, and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is at 27,000. Adjusted, that's only 35–45,000 copies each, even though both have lead nearly every Best Books of 2007 list yet published, Johnson's won the National Book Award for fiction, and Diaz's is "One of the year's best reviewed novels and a likely Pulitzer Prize contender".
Reader Comments (4)
Well, the Diaz has only been out for a couple of months. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that's all that bad for contemporary litfic.
No, I think you're absolutely right, though I'm surprised and pleased that you have such an accurate sense of sales numbers for literary fiction. I tend to hear assumptions from people outside publishing, that sales of all popular works must be in the six or seven digits. Literary or otherwise.
As the ultimate sales realist, I can't help but agree with the other Sara—those are some good (ie high) sales figures. And don't forget that both books are in hardcover. The paperbacks of both should do at least as well.
So sad to compare the sales of a blockbuster literary novel with the take of a film that "flops"!
Thanks for your comment Sara (the second). And you're right, the more I look at it, the more the numbers for Johnson and Diaz seem rosier and rosier. I think what I was trying to get at here was, If these are the sales numbers for tremendously received books, what must the numbers look like for all the other like-minded but less-acclaimed books published every year? It's the implied answer that at least gives pause. You'd know better than I, but what do you think average sales are across literary fiction, saying just in paperback? 10,000? 5,000? Less?
And yes, please let's not start looking at movie numbers!