Selling books (was: Denis Johnson)

[Doug Millison]

The NYT article is on the Web at
http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/970812bookchains-power.html.

It is disquieting to see merchandising moving so boldly into book
publishing. If market research and consumer focus groups and all of the
rest of that apparatus really could predict what mass market taste will
support, the movie business wouldn't be the hit-or-miss black art that it
is, for example. To the degree that book publishing increases its drive
towards being a hit-driven business, publishers will, like movie producers,
discover that putting together a collectioin of "hit" elements (a writer
who's produced a past hit, a cover artist with a track record, etc.)
doesn't guarantee a hit -- if you could do it by formula, "Batman & Robin"
would have been the summer's biggest movie, after all, instead of the flop
it has been called.

I see some good news in the NYT article, and in this trend generally, for
authors and publishers, however -- the ability to use the Internet to
generate awareness of books and develop audiences that can build to the
threshold levels necessary to get a book into wide distribution.

Here's a relevant quote from the article: "The chains are being treated as
sages, in part because they possess a ready  base of computerized
information about national sales and trends that can take weeks for a
publisher to piece together."

That's precisely the kind of information an author or publisher can
generate from a web site, in addition to being able to use a web site and
other internet strategies to create an audience for a book -- witness Paul
Di Filippo's ability to use the internet to support his book, just to name
a very recent example. (Of course the sword cuts both ways, I suppose --
there's Lineland, too, but despite the questions about the way Lineland's
content was developed and the other issues, Dale is demonstrating how to
publish books and use the internet to market them.)

For every book that fails to persuade a Barnes and Nobel bean counter,
there's probably an Internet strategy that can turn it into a success at
some level.

-Doug

At 11:22 AM 8/12/97, Steven Maas (CUTR) wrote:
>The article *is* disturbing.

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