Monday’s WSJ story about Holt’s failure to actualize its hopes for The Interpretation of Murder continued to generate commentary throughout the week. At the blog Making Light, Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden let loose with a brutal critique of the Journal’s blockbuster mentality. “I’ve been hearing the ‘publishing is becoming a winner-take-all sweepstakes’ riff since I started working in the industry,” she says. “It’s not true, and it’s not becoming true.”
“Bestsellers aren’t the whole of publishing. Every year, we publish a great many okaysellers. You guys buy them because they look interesting, or because a friend has recommended them, or because you liked another book by that author. Marketing push only goes so far.”
Nielsen Hayden also attacks the notion that every year brings 172,000 new books fighting for limited shelf space: “If you’re talking about new titles that would come through a large urban bookstore in a single year, one rough but reliable estimate I’ve been given (by a source that declined to be named) is that it’s about 10,000 titles.” And the ones that’ll stay on those shelves over the long haul, she suggests, are the “okaysellers,” not “the front-of-the-store pyramids of red-hot bestsellers [that] come and go.”