Are Things as Bad as They Seem?

Could things possibly get worse in the business of publishing? Independent bookstores are closing shop, book review sections are being eliminated, publishers are more focused than ever on the bottom line, and, like the culture at large, publishing is feast-or-famine, with many fewer feasters. Perhaps the most striking portrayal of the situation came from Rachel Donadio in the NYTBR already a couple of years ago. In her essay "Promotional Intelligence," Donadio pointed out that, according to Nielsen Bookscan, "in 2005, almost half of all sales in the literary fiction category came from the top 20 best-selling books." That's an incredible statistic, and extremely sobering.

So is there any good news? The relative commercial success of Joseph O'Neill's wonderful novel Netherland, which I'm glad Mark has featured at the top of TEV's page (if memory serves, I believe Netherland made it onto the NYT extended bestseller list) is heartening. Here's a book by a writer who, though he already had two novels out, was relatively unknown, and which came without a splashy cover. True, the book has cricket, which gave it an angle that made it more marketable, and the Times did a feature on the book and cricket. But, really, in this case I think it was the power of several promiment rave reviews (Dwight Garner, Michiko Kakutani, and James Woods) and word-of-mouth--the book is simply so good.

There are other happy stories too, a number of them close to unbelievable. The fact, for instance, that Jumpa Lahiri's latest collection of stories was number 1 on the NYT hardback bestseller list at one point. The much-maligned short story! The most purchased hardback book of fiction in America! And a very good collection, at that. It should give succor to every story writer in the U.S. who has been told that stories just don't sell. True, it may just be an indication of the selling power of the Lahiri name (she could probably sell the phone book at this point). Still, it's good news.

Then there's James Wood. True, he's become a cult figure in the world of literary criticism. But the words "literary criticism" have never made one think book sales. Yet there James Wood was, as Dwight Garner pointed out in his column in the NYTBR, at number 29 on the extended list. And this was before How Fiction Works got eviscerated on the front page of the Book Review by Walter Kirn, a
fact that, though it probably made Wood unhappy (no matter how respected and successful you are, no one likes a bad review), has likely only increased his sales, since when it comes to sales, there's generally no such thing as a bad review.

Finally there's Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, which, unbelievably, spent some time on the NYT bestseller list itself. I say unbelievably because the book (read it if you haven't; it's terrific) is a high-level treatise on the way a fiction writer should read and suggests, perhaps, that there's a bigger pool of sophisticated readers out there. Or it may suggest that there's a bigger pool of aspiring writers out there. According to one USA Today poll, 82 percent of Americans have either written a book or would like to write one. Now, if only 82 percent of Americans would like to read one. Then we'd have reason to take heart.

Comments

[Gwen Dawson]

I should've read this post before asking for book recommendations about reading fiction in a comment to an above post! Thanks for the Prose recommendation.