Is it me, or does the summer so far seem slow, even by publishing standards?
A year ago this month, the media world was abuzz with the release of the latest Harry Potter installment and the typical frenzy books in that series create. Never mind that there was some grumbling, post publication, that the books didn't sell quite as well as Scholastic had hoped: there was no question it was still a blockbuster.
Flash forward: the hint, via a BBC interview with author J.K. Rowling, that Harry might be killed off created only a tiny blip in the Pottersphere. Even the normally scandal-hungry publishing media (in which I begrudgingly include some of us at PW) can't find much to get excited about. Why, just six months ago we had James Frey, and then Kaavya Viswanathaan, and even a little Dan Brown to dish. Today, even the Ann Coulter plagiarism story didn't get much traction. Could it be that, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, we just can't find any writers or publishers to kick around anymore?
What's more—and more important—though, is that we also don't seem to have much to crow about. Sales are, at best, flat (which, as we all know, is really the "new up"). And yes, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is performing better than many publishing pundits expected. But the hardcover fiction market? Give me a break. Is there really anything new to discover about Janet Evanovich, Danielle Steel, Dean Koontz or the overproducing factory known as James Patterson? Other than the surprising return (to some; not us, see our starred review) of John Updike to bestsellerdom, there's been nothing.
Every summer, the drumbeat begins to summon a star fiction book from the wilderness: What will be this season's version of, say. The Lovely Bones, Little, Brown's sleeper-turned-blockbuster of 2002? Little, Brown also had a mighty good run last summer with Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. And for a couple of weeks now, Algonquin's Water for Elephants has been showing up on bestseller lists and bedside tables. But will it be the beach bag staple that makes a break-out summer success? Or might that distinction fall to a paperback—Penguin's The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards? Less The Lovely Bones than The Kite Runner—which sold relatively modestly in hardcover and then burst out in paperback, thanks to that elusive phenomenon, "word of mouth"—Edwards's book hits #1 on our paperback fiction list this week. How this somewhat treacly story of a doctor who banishes his own damaged child struck such a nerve is the question du jour. Marketing or magic? You decide.
In situations like this, I always like to come down on the side of the magical, and not because I discount the hard work publishers and publicists do to "make" books, most of which, frankly, don't really get made. To put it plainly: nobody, not one of us, really knows why some books fly and others flop—even if we opine about it freely. Yes, paperbacks, at $14, are an easier buy for most readers, and yes, some good reviews of the hardcover and big-name blurbs—both of which the publisher surely worked hard to get—don't hurt. But there's also the unavoidable fact that readers, as a group, are among the most whimsical and unpredictable of folk.
God bless 'em.
Ain't publishing grand?
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