When the Boston Red Sox held their victory parade along the Charles River on October 30, Scribner wanted to tout Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan's upcoming chronicle of the 2004 season, Faithful. So the S&S imprint rented a plane to fly over the thronging millions with a banner ad. But the weather was bad and the plane couldn't get off the ground, stranding the book without publicity at an event that offered a massive captive audience.
The Red Sox fans of old—that is, of last month—might have interpreted the situation symbolically. But as fans' sentiments about the team are rising, so is the publishing industry's optimism. Case in point: Borders doubled its order of the King/O'Nan book after the Sox took Game 3 of the Series, before the team had even won the championship.
Still, as Red Sox books begin arriving later this month and then continue through the spring, the prospect of soaring sales is tempered by a nagging thought. Few observers doubt that a wave of media, coupled with a large base of new and old fans, will make several of the new books bestsellers. But given that the subgenre is predicated on the team's chronic losing streak, some also wonder if the win may be the last truly great sales opportunity for what until now has been a publishing cottage industry catering to native New England fatalism.
Houghton Mifflin has the most invested in the culture of suffering. In 1990, the Boston-based house published Boston Globe sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy's now classic The Curse of the Bambino (1990), which popularized the notion of a curse in recounting the team's downtrodden history. Currently, Houghton is preparing to release Shaughnessy's latest title, Reverse the Curse, focusing primarily on the Yankees-Sox rivalry while including material on how and why the curse ended.
The house moved publication from May 2005 to March, which means the book won't have to contend with as many competing books as it would this fall, but the euphoria surrounding the win will have died down too.
One of Houghton's biggest competitors is taking the opposite approach. Scribner is rushing its King/O'Nan title into stores the week before Thanksgiving. That's in part because Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season is not a narrative reconstruction nor a longer historic analysis, but an epistolary exchange about the season and post-season.
With a 500,000-copy announced first printing, the book has received strong interest from the chains and other national accounts anticipating brisk sales among the many Red Sox fans around the country—New England ex-pats, former Boston-area college students and literary sports fans everywhere. Oh yeah, and King fans. The book has also benefited from King's face time on Red Sox telecasts. "That's endorsement and promotion money can't buy," said Scribner publicity director Suzanne Balaban.
But while there's an undeniable swelling of Sox interest, there's an unusual feeling of urgency about getting the books to market quickly, given that the reversal of the curse upsets the classic underdog narrative that has fueled so much drama (and publishing) surrounding the team. "There's been a tectonic shift in Red Sox Nation," said Susan Canavan, Shaughnessy's editor. "Dan is sort of figuring this out. I think all the Red sox writers are. It's strange. It's a new way of thinking." Canavan also joked that this was a "classic" New England response: "We have this wonderful triumph and yet we're wondering, 'What will we complain about next?' "
Indeed, publishing stats over the last several decades bear out that, while the curse has been heartache for Red Sox fans, it's been a boon (or some might say Boone, after the Yankee symbol for Red Sox suffering), for publishers. In addition to Shaughnessy's Curse and his nostalgic At Fenway: Dispatches from Red Sox Nation (Three Rivers, 1997), which have been sales stalwarts, there are several other successful books that trade on the team's rich and frustrating history, like David Halberstam's account of 1940's Red Sox players, The Teammates, which has sold nearly 250,000 copies according to Nielsen Bookscan, and Glenn Stout's and Richard Johnson's Red Sox Century, the bestselling book about many decades of Red Sox exasperation.
Other publishers are also part of this new opportunity—and pushing their titles like they may never have the chance to capitalize on the Red Sox in such a big way again. Chicago's Triumph Books, which normally publishes instant titles about champions in the major sports, is doing simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions of two new Red Sox books, BelieveIt and Finally, based on material published in the Boston Globe. The publisher has ordered a combined total of 300,000 copies and distributed the book on a wider national scale than it usually does, hoping to take advantage of the high degree of interest. The house is also putting a new jacket on Bill "Spaceman" Lee's book, The Little Red (Sox) Book, an alternative history of the last 80 years in which the Sox win many championships and the Yankees wander in a wasteland.
Public Affairs is in a similar spot with its newly announced instant book by Ted Williams biographer Leigh Montville, Why Not Us?, that's due in January and capitalizes on a rare moment of fan euphoria that won't be equaled for at least another 86 years.
But perhaps the book that most epitomizes the limits of the publishing window is When the Sox Won the Series, a 2003 Running Press title from Globe writer Bob Ryan about the team's 1903 Series title. The publisher is hoping the book can hang on to its currency for just a little bit longer, though even now, the title phrase conjures up images of this October. Running has sent out a special mailer and put the author on a media tour.
Just after the Sox wrapped up the Series, fans talked about a desire to keep this improbable season going. "There was a sense of the agony and ecstasy the day after the win," said Scribner's Balaban. "You almost want the team to keep playing." But, of course, all streaks, in baseball and in publishing, must come to an end.
