Keep talking.(Foreword)(book sales)

I think it's fair to say that what preoccupies the minds of most book people is the question of which books sell, and why. The rumble around this issue has gotten louder in recent weeks, amid news of and discussion about changing newspaper coverage. As I indicated last week and as many others have suggested before and since--nobody really knows how much reviews, off-the-book-page coverage and even advertising influences sales.

So it can be instructive to look at books that get a lot of ink and/or "buzz" and then look at their sales. The New York Times did this a few weeks ago with Leslie Bennetts's The Feminine Mistake and concluded that the 5,000 or so copies that Nielsen BookScan reported sold was woefully disproportionate to the amount of noise the Hyperion/Voice book had generated. (Never mind that the piece itself created even more conversation, and that now, the number sold is up to 8,000.) That information was probably surprising only to Times readers who toil outside our beloved business: while 5,000 books is hardly in the blockbuster galaxy, most book people would say it's not bad for an "issue book" that had, at the time, been in stores for less than a week.

Still, partly because they don't quite know what else to do, publicists still seek buzz and ink and "coverage" as part of the let's-throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks publicity philosophy. And sometimes, something does stick. Consider, for example, George Tenet's At the Center of the Storm, one title that has an impressive buzz-to-sales ratio. The embargoed book was (of course) leaked before its April 30 pub date. While few formal reviews have been published, there have been countless stories about the book, as well as ...