Dirty Little Secrets: Part 2
In Part 1 I focused mainly on the unreliability of those bestseller lists that grace our nation’s newspapers at least once in a week.
In Part 2, I’m going to focus more on the publishing industry itself, the shrowd of secrecy surrounding book sales, and real world implications of this secrecy. As I said before, the "traditional" publishing industry is very secretive about book sales figures. But the big question here is: why? What advantage does it serve them to keep such numbers under wraps?
First, it might help to understand the reality of the publishing business: over half the books published won’t make money! That’s pretty disturbing. But it gets worse. In an article published by the LA Times in February 2007, there’s a quote by Albert Greco, an economist who studies the publishing industry:
"We estimate that out of every 10 hardcover adult books, seven lose money, two break even and one is a hit," he said. "So, of course, this business is secretive about sales. Would you want to tell the world that 70% of your output is losing money?"
I think his quote sums up the problem nicely. There’s nothing inherently "proprietary" about sales numbers, especially if you’re successfull. But when 70% of your output is losing money, as Greco points out, that’s nothing to brag about – and indeed it makes sense to keep those numbers under tight lock and key. Why advertise failure?
Okay, so maybe the reading public-at-large doesn’t need to know which publishing house sold how many books during any given period. I can live with that. However, there are certain people who should probably be privy to those numbers. And there are certain situations in when these certain people should be privy to book sales numbers because these situations involve large sums of money.
What the heck am I talking about?
Here’s a real world example: bestselling novelist Clive Cussler, who writes adventure/mystery novels, is tangled up in a legal suit with a production company that produced the Hollywood-flop movie Sahara. The production company says that the novelist and his agent deliberatley lied about book sales figures in order to fetch a larger sum of money for the movie rights to the book. Here’s where the problem lies:
The number of books sold determines the cost of adaptation rights and the size of movie budgets, Putnam explained. He recounted sworn testimony from Anschutz and three former Crusader executives that Cussler and Lampack frequently cited sales exceeding 100 million books to justify getting paid an unprecedented $10 million per book.
Ah, so here’s a case where accurate sales figures can make a big difference. If there had been an accurate statement of book sales (granted, given the long time frame involved, that is hard to do) this legal wrangling would probably never have taken place.
This is only one example of the consequences of the a hush-hush attitude towards book sales numbers. I’m sure there are other examples out there, but I’m sure you get the idea.
Check out the LA Times article here:
Trust them, it’s a hit
Check out the article about Clive Cussler case here:
Cussler’s tale is laced with lies, defense says
Related posts
- Dirty Little Secrets: Part 1
- What’s the truth about the publishing industry?
- Who published that book you’re reading?
- Amazon claims to sell more ebooks than hardcover books
- BookExpo America pushes forward amid slumping book sales
Read More: Publishing News
