Point: Few people buy books that aren’t celebrity aligned. Britney Spears’s autobiography, released October 24, 2023, is currently #1 in Kindle, #10 in hardcover on Amazon. Aside of these, publishing houses stay afloat through backlist sales: Bibles, coloring books, and Don Quixote.
Counterpoint: Plenty of people are buying books, and the big publishers aren’t objective reporters on their own business.
“Someone from a prestige big 5 imprint whose books are often award-contenders and bestsellers once told me any book that sold less than 25,000 in print was a failure for them. OTOH, when I was in an MFA program—where many of the professors wrote experimental literary novels and such—I was told anything more than 5,000 sales was a success. Some small press editors might be happy with 1,000 sales.”
Topping Amazon’s fiction list for most sold this week are The Women,
by Kristin Hannah (12 weeks on the list) and The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese (33 weeks).
As booklovers, we may want many more people to join us in reading, sharing, and enjoying the written or recorded word, but I don’t think the sky is falling yet.
Also in this vein, Ted Gioia offers “10 Reasons Why I’m Publishing My Next Book on Substack.“
What else do we need to know?
Poetry: On April 26, 1336, a great poet climbed into the Alps just for the thrill of it, which people didn’t do in those days. Petrarch climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux (which is much higher today because of inflation) and read from Augustine’s Confessions, “Where I fixed my eyes first, it was written: ‘And men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean and the revolutions of the stars – and desert themselves.’ . . .”
Memoir: Writing about his life, Marvin Olasky says to be open to change. Don’t set a groove early and try to stay there.
C.S. Lewis: Screwtape praises certain celebrities and the sheep of their flock
Music: Ted Gioia writes western music isn’t what we think it is. “Just stop and think for a moment about the importance of Venice in the history of music. Everything from madrigals to operas found their home in that bustling port city—a key connecting point between West and East in the modern imagination.”