“After reading the post by the publicist I had a few thoughts that I think your readers would find interesting,” began an unsigned but non-whiny email that arrived yesterday. “First, as a book publisher my faith in publicity on paper is great, but in practice is not so great.”
“One example that proves my point is the new [Joel Osteen] book. Here is [a] guy with an amazing platform who has gotten a lot of press coverage, yet his book is not selling that well. Many books are purchased on proposals and that is where platform, publicity, etc. look great, but in practice it takes a lot more than that to sell a book. Why aren’t readers buying [Osteen’s] book? Why isn’t it number one on the NYT list? The answer: Readers did not like the book because it was very similar in title and content to his first book.”
That might be the answer—but there are other things we should consider, like whether we’re asking the right questions. Let us concede at the onset that Osteen’s latest, Become a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Every Day, does sound awfully similar to 2004’s Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential, which Nielsen Bookscan tells me has sold 1,544,000 copies in hardcover in just over three years. But with Become a Better You selling 362,000 copies in less than two months, can we really say it’s “not selling that well”? Should we be so quick to write the book’s performance off? I don’t know. I don’t know what expectations Free Press had when they snagged Osteen from Warner‘s [now Hachette‘s] FaithWords division, or how much they paid to do it, or what they’re putting into it (though I’m sure it’s a lot). I don’t know that it’s that awful to be on #5 on the NYT hardcover advice list, especially when your competition is the latest You health book, Jessica Seinfeld‘s spinach brownies, and the Daring Book for Girls/Dangerous Book for Boys franchise. What I do know is that 362,000 in six weeks seems like a respectable start, a “problem” most authors and their publishers would be glad to have, and that we probably shouldn’t count Joel Osteen out yet.
The lesson our anonymous publisher draws from this example—”editors feel a safety net when they write a check for a book that is like another book, but I can assure them that they are making a terrible blunder”—shouldn’t come as any great surprise to us. After all, as the email asks, “How many Marley and Me books out there have not sold well?” Then again, Anna Quindlen and Mark R. Levin seem to be doing okay for themselves writing about their dogs—of course, they both have amazing platforms.