Sarah’s got the raw data in her post, and with the caveat that Bookscan doesn’t tell the whole story, I’ve got some thoughts on what we’ve been told. Namely that it makes perfect sense that Veronica did nearly twice as well as the hardcover edition of Europe Central: After all, given the choice between a slim novel filled with sex and drugs and a thick collection of stories pondering the complex moral universe of mid-20th century Germany and the Soviet Union (with fifty pages of notes, no less!), what do you think the average consumer’s going to take to the counter? And the price tags—$23 for Gaitskill, $39.95 for Vollmann—no doubt added to that gap; witness the fact that nearly 1,100 readers were ready to pounce on Europe Central within a week of its release in a (more) affordable paperback edition. Some of that’s attributable to award-chasers, sure, but I’m willing to bet that there’s also a strong contingent of indie-minded readers who love Vollmann’s stuff but can’t afford hardcovers.
Both of those books had their NYTBR reviews squarely in the middle pages; what happens when Sam Tanenhaus goes to the trouble to move the praise so that it faces out on the cover? In the case of Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision, it looks like it helps you crack the 10,000 barrier: respectable enough for a first-time novel, to be sure, but one would probably expect slightly better numbers from “the funniest and smartest coming-of-age novel in years” (except, of course, that one probably will see those numbers…in dog-eared paperbacks).
In yesterday’s Publishers Lunch, though, Michael Cader gives plenty of good reasons for why we should take Edward Wyatt’s Times piece with a whole shaker of salt. “The stuff that is selling just isn’t what the Times likes to see at the top of the lists,” Cader observes, and as far as this myth that people in the post-9/11 world want to read about reality goes, well, commercial fiction and the genre stuff is still readily outperforming nonfiction. Is there a market interested in “Islam, the Middle East, Iraq and United States politics”? Sure, and there are obvious reasons why those people are buying books on those subjects, just as in the late ’90s they were buying books about Eastern Europe and the politics of impeachment.