My first thought in reading about the legal battle between film producer Philip Anschutz and author Clive Cussler is that Anschutz is, at best, very naïve. The mogul suggests, according to the L.A. Times of February 18, that he had high expectations for his movie version of Cussler's 2005 book, Sahara, because he "had been told" (though, interestingly, the piece doesn't say by whom) that Cussler's book "had sold 100 million copies worldwide." On the strength of this "information," he paid $10 million for the film rights. When the movie bombed, he cried foul. Surely, he surmised, if the book had been that successful (and expensive), the movie version would succeed.
What? What? Since when does a movie producer bank on a financially successful book automatically becoming a successful movie? Has Anschutz never heard of, say, The Da Vinci Code, Memoirs of a Geisha or even most spectacularly, Bonfire of the Vanities? The producer's contention seemed, at first blush, like just another example of publishing, and authors, getting blamed for someone else's creative missteps and/or the vagaries of the entertainment marketplace.
On second thought, the trial does raise an important point about the way books and their sales are computed and hyped. Sahara, it's worth mentioning, was published in 1994—pre—Nielsen BookScan—which, like it or not, today reports about 70% of national book sales. In other words, that 100-million-copy figure could only have come from Cussler's agent or publisher. But what's an ambitious movie producer to do? Without official market reporting—or a look at royalty statements, which are computed way after the fact, are sometimes themselves inaccurate and which no author is likely to show to anyone but the IRS (under duress)—he has no choice but to take the word of a very interested party.
And the problem is, those interested parties often... dissemble, even in the face of available fact. Oh, yes, our first printing is 100,000 copies, they'll tell you, when the fact is that they hope to ship 100,000 copies, total. (Experienced hands know first printing figures are, at best, two-thirds of that.) Oh, sure, BookScan reports that this book sold "only" 5,000 copies, they'll say, but BookScan doesn't get figures from Wal-Mart, where it was a blockbuster. Why all the wiggling? Because it increases interest and builds hype and manages perception—perception being, after all, what passes for reality in our increasingly media-saturated, spin-spun world. Hey, look, perception management is what got Clive Cussler an extra, very real, $10 million.
It's probably not realistic to expect this behavior to change any time soon. You won't likely see publishers trumpeting the fact that their National Book Award winner's sales jumped, post award, from 4,000 copies to a big 10,000 (if they're lucky). But going out of your way to hide the truth is beyond silly. The fact is, many, many books sell "only" 10,000 copies—and if the advances were accordingly modest (a big if), that can be plenty for a publisher to make a profit. Besides, publishers often publish books for personal, political, intellectual and social reasons; they know they're not publishing blockbusters, so why not view the successes on those terms, instead of fudging the numbers?
If perception is all, consider this: our constant dissembling runs the risk of making noble books look like failures, and book people like liars.
Agree? Disagree? Tell us at www.publishersweekly.com/saranelson
