Case in point: When I was getting my MFA, a classmate of mine won the Associated Writers Program contest for his collection of stories, and it got published by the University of Massachusetts Press. The person who was the contest runner-up, and who therefore didn’t have his collection published, was a young writer named Tom Perrotta. Now, if Tom Perrotta had won that contest, would you know who he was today? Possibly not. The writer who did win that contest, though he subsequently published a novel with a trade press, you likely haven’t heard of. Or, if you have, it’s because he’s made a name for himself in the blog world and has gotten a book contract as a result of that. In other words, to the extent that he has succeeded (and he’s a good writer), he has done so despite his having had his story collection published, not because of it.

Back to Matrimony. With a first novel that had weak sales as her ammunition, my agent, who’s both respected and powerful, had trouble selling Matrimony (In the case of Swimming Across the Hudson, she sold it in less than a week, based on the first fifty pages), and were it not for the fact that someone very high up at the house she eventually sold it to loved the book, it might not have sold at all.

In the end, I’m one of the lucky ones. Matrimony was published by Pantheon, a terrific publishing house, and I had the considerable support of a great editor, publisher, publicist, and sales force. The house spent money on coop and advertising and sent me on a long book tour. The reviews were well-timed and very positive. Within ten days of publication, Janet Maslin reviewed Matrimony very favorably in the daily New York Times. Two weeks after that, Jennifer Egan did the same in the NYTBR. At the end of the year, Matrimony was named a New York Times Notable Book.

All these things had a marked impact on sales (I know: I follow the numbers very carefully), as did the fact that I spent much of the past year and half putting the writing of my next novel on hold so that I could help publicize Matrimony. You don’t go visiting sixty book clubs for the mere fun of it. It takes you away from your family and friends, and from your next novel. And, in my case, book groups weren’t even the half of it. I lived on the Internet, guest blogging, getting my book out to bloggers big and small—all, it’s been clear, to Matrimony’s benefit.

Matrimony, let me be clear, is not a sexy book. It’s about the fifteen-year history of a marriage, and it’s character-driven and quiet. There are no pyrotechnics in the novel. It’s a book that easily could have gone nowhere without a lot of hard work on the part of Pantheon (and now Vintage,) and some additional leg work from me. In the end, Matrimony sold a good deal more than five thousand hardback copies and Vintage has high hopes for the paperback. And yet it didn’t sell astronomically. It did more than respectably, but if my publishers were relying on me to pay the bills, they’d be in trouble. I say all this because, if anything, the relative success of Matrimony is a testament to how tough the book business is. It took everything—a publisher that really got behind the book, great reviews, a really good cover, an author willing to drop everything else to help with promotion—in order to get the book to do even this well.

Which brings me back to my original concern about our feast-or-famine book culture—and, ever so indirectly and in the name of making this conversation at Booksquare an ongoing discussion, to the question of the demise of the LATBR. I have read with interest both what Steve Wasserman and what Kassia have written on the subject. I know much less than either of them do about the book review section. I live on the East Coast, and I never read the LATBR regularly. I wrote one review for Steve Wasserman and one for David Ulin, and both my novels were reviewed in the book review’s pages. I agree with Kassia that there’s good and bad criticism in print just as there’s good and bad criticism on the web. And it may very well be that the LATBR had it coming to them. And newspapers, it is true, are a business in trouble, and a sense of entitlement isn’t going get a book review section to come back.

All that said, I think there’s something that a book review section at a major newspaper offers that may be harder to find on the web. That’s the all-important inadvertent reader. Someone, that is, who would never buy the L.A. Times for the book review section but who nonetheless is stuck with it when the paper arrives. He ends up glancing at it and discovering a book he hadn’t known about. And seeing it next time he’s at the bookstore. And maybe buying a copy. What I’ve been trying to argue in this post is that it’s the inadvertent reader and the inadvertent book buyer who’s crucial, particularly for literary fiction, where the number of potential readers is so small and needs desperately to be expanded. This is why coop is crucial, why independent bookstores are crucial, why book review sections are crucial. They’re all avenues for making us aware of books we otherwise wouldn’t be aware of.

Now, the web can do this too, certainly, and a lot of the literary blogs have done a great deal to call attention to books that otherwise wouldn’t be known. But I think inadvertence occurs much less frequently on the web. Yes, a person who loves literary fiction might learn about a book on The Elegant Variation that she otherwise wouldn’t have known about, and that’s no small thing. But what about the person who doesn’t love literary fiction—or, more to the point, doesn’t realize that she in fact would love literary fiction if only it were placed in front of her? If you’re reading The Elegant Variation, you’re already part of the choir. But the choir is going to have to get a lot bigger if writers of literary fiction are going to make a go of it.

We all need inadvertent readers. In the same way that Michael Chabon developed a strong gay readership when, as a result of Mysteries of Pittsburgh, people mistakenly thought he was gay, I’ve gotten some inadvertent readers based on the title of my novel. Someone sees a novel called Matrimony and they might think they’ll be reading Jodi Picoult. Then they read Matrimony and discover it’s the farthest thing in the world from Jodi Picoult. In certain cases they’re angry—they feel duped—but in other cases—this is what a writer hopes for—they discover that there’s more to life than Jodi Picoult. That is one of the things I’ve been doing in visiting book groups: expanding my reader base and, in the process, trying to educate people who might otherwise be reluctant to leave their comfort zone about the pleasures of literary fiction.

In any case, it’s not an either/or proposition, and in this publishing climate, the loss of every book review section, every independent bookstore, every book blog cuts deep. The publishing world knows how important the New York Times Book Review is, which is why publishers continue to advertise there even when it’s not seen as cost-effective. The fact is, it is cost effective, certainly in the long run, because the loss of the NYTBR would be a huge, almost unfathomable blow.

I believe individual readers should have the same attitude toward writers that the big publishing houses have toward the NYTBR. Protect what you value. Buy books. I can’t tell you the number of times people have said to me, “I loved your book so much I lent it to five friends.” This is flattering, but it doesn’t help me with Bookscan. Every time a used copy of Matrimony gets sold on Amazon, that’s another sale that doesn’t get counted. People who are committed to books need to support writers because if they don’t there won’t be any of us left.

OK, at the risk of having ended on a preachy note, I want to thank Kassia again for having me as a guest blogger, and having allowed me to be so long-winded!

Fine print: Joshua Henkin’s website. Go. Buy Matrimony: paperback or (yay!) Kindle edition. Comment below — it’s free!

Thank you to Joshua Henkin for this great two-part look at book clubs, sales, and the industry.

The post Joshua Henkin: Some Thoughts on Book Groups, Book Sales, Book Review Sections, and the Publishing Industry – Part the Second appeared first on Booksquare.

Hello, everyone, and thank you, Kassia, for lending me your bully pulpit. I’m here to offer a novelist’s perspective on the publishing industry on the day (at least the day that I’m composing this) that Oscar Villalon seems to be out at the San Francisco Chronicle book review, a section that may soon suffer the same fate as the LATBR.

My novel Matrimony has just come out in paperback, so I’m starting up the second round of book touring and publicity. In that connection, I was recently asked the following question by an interviewer: “What do you believe is the basis for this country’s love for literature and books?” Were we living on the same planet, I wondered, much less in the same country? In fairness, the question was about book groups, and according to a report of the Independent Book Publishing Association, over five million adults belong to a book group.

I don’t know whether those numbers are accurate, but there’s no doubt that the proliferation of book groups has been a boon to publishing. Certainly Oprah has helped keep the industry afloat, and the myriad book groups across the country have risen in no small part thanks to Oprah. I talk about book groups from personal experience. Since Matrimony was published last October, I have participated in close to sixty book group discussions of Matrimony in person, by phone, and online, and I expect to do many more now that the paperback has been released. I have never been a member of a book group (as a novelist and a professor of fiction-writing, my life is a book group), but I can safely say that I now have had more personal experience with book groups than most people on this earth.

I have written elsewhere about my experience visiting book groups, but in short, though I approached the endeavor with a good deal of wariness (I started out thinking of book groups as a kind of Ladies who Lunch and I expected my own experience to be If it’s Tuesday it Must be Darien), I have been pleasantly surprised. Not every book group member is a sophisticated reader (not every MFA student is a sophisticated reader, either, nor is every book critic), but quite a few are, and they are passionate about what they read. More important, book groups are creating new readers. People usually join a book group for social reasons, but reading a book is part of the deal, and so a reader is created out of someone who wasn’t one before.

But the news is not all good. I was struck by the fact that most book groups are reading the same twelve books. Water for Elephants, Eat, Pray, Love, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, The Kite Runner. I’m not casting aspersions at these books, a number of which I haven’t even read. But even if you love these books, they certainly aren’t the only good books out there.

In any case, what interests me more than the popularity of these books is the manner in which they get selected, because the process says a great deal not just about book groups but about American book-buying in general. I’ve seen it so many times it has become a ritual. 9:30 comes, sometimes 10:00, even 10:30. The book group members are getting tired. Husbands are waiting at home (yes, it’s true: book groups are populated almost entirely by women), and everyone needs to wake up early in the morning. When’s the next meeting, and what book are we going to discuss? People have to choose quickly before everyone disperses. Does anybody have an idea?

Someone says, “How about The Memory Keeper’s Daughter?”

Most of the people in the group have heard of it. One person knows someone who loved it; another person knows someone who hated it. But it’s a known entity. Does anyone have any other ideas? People are unsure, silent. Someone glances at her watch.

“O.K., then: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter it is.”

I’m not saying this is how it always happens. But you’d be surprised how often it does. If people haven’t heard of the book they don’t want to read it, so name-recognition rules. Oprah chose it, so we’ll choose it. It’s not even as thought-out as that. In a world with too many choices, people choose what’s familiar. It’s as true of books as of anything else.

This is why, though writers hate negative reviews, a negative review is much better than no review at all. The old adage is true: there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Two weeks after the review has come out, no one remembers what the review said, but when a person comes across the book at the bookstore, he says to himself, I know I’ve heard of this somewhere, and the writer just might have himself a sale.

But “comes across the book at the bookstore” is key. There are too many books competing for too little space. As readers of this blog no doubt know but startlingly few others do (I discovered this first-hand from talking to book groups), the space in the window and on the front table at Barnes and Noble and Borders is bought by the publisher. It’s called coop, and because books tend to be impulse buys, if you don’t have coop for your book, you’re going nowhere. The reason that the average hardback book has a shelf life of six to eight weeks isn’t that people have short attention spans. It’s that the book quickly gets restocked to the back of the store, and, shortly thereafter, it’s returned to the publisher. Once your book is out of sight, you’re only going to sell copies to people who walk into the store intent on buying it.

It’s for this reason that if a writer were given a heap of money and told she could spend it however she wanted to market her book, I’d recommend that she spend part of it focus-grouping different covers (I’m astonished that publishers don’t focus-group their covers; the cover is the single most important thing in getting someone to buy a book, and you have only a nanosecond to attract a reader’s attention), and I’d have her spend the rest on coop. (Remember, this is a hypothetical. With rare exceptions, authors have little to no say over their covers, and coop is prohibitively expensive. Even if the author could afford to pay for it, he wouldn’t be allowed to because publishing houses have a limited number of slots and are therefore forced to choose which of their books get coop.)

In any case, the placement of your book in the bookstore is probably the single most important determinant of its sales, as Borders recently discovered when, as an experiment in some stores, it started stocking fewer books but placing more of them face-out. The results were startling (though they shouldn’t have been): Borders sold many more books. In fact, as I’m writing this post, I just clicked onto the following from Reuters: “The Borders Group, the bookseller, posted a lower-than-expected quarterly loss, helped by TIGHTER INVENTORY and lower costs.” [emphasis added].

There you have it. The way bookstores make money is by stocking fewer books. This, of course, is bad news for writers, especially for those writers who haven’t yet established themselves. In Los Angeles, the loss of Dutton’s is reflective of what’s going on everywhere—independent bookstores are hemorrhaging nationwide. This is a huge problem because independent bookstores were an important stopgap against the problem I’m talking about. At a place like Dutton’s, what’s at the front of the store is not as crucial as it is at the chains, because you have booksellers who know books and can recommend something to a customer. What’s more, these booksellers help determine what gets placed at the front of the store.

In the same way that we buy coffee from fewer and fewer stores, we buy books from fewer and fewer booksellers. Our choices get constricted, our taste gets streamlined, so when a book group decides what to pick next, its members choose one of the ten or so books that come to their minds, which are the same ten or so books that come to everyone’s mind, whether they’re in Hoboken or Fayetteville or Evanston or Anchorage. As with the economy at large, the book industry is feast-or-famine. Nowhere was this made more clear to me than in Rachel Donadio’s endpaper “Promotional Intelligence” in the New York Times Book Review a couple of years ago. Donadio noted that in 2005 “almost half of all sales in the literary fiction category came from the 20 best-selling books.” That’s an astonishing and disheartening statistic.

Take my own case. When Matrimony came out last October, I was essentially an unknown writer. My first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, had come out ten years earlier and did well critically but sold only about five thousand copies in hardback. My graduate students think that selling a first novel is hard, but selling a second novel is even harder, unless you’re one of the handful of writers whose first book takes off. I have quite a few friends who have written really good second novels that they can’t sell because their first novels sold poorly. Prior to Nielsen Bookscan, agents could fudge their writers’ numbers. Now those numbers are incontrovertible, spat back from a computer.

Fine print: Joshua Henkin’s website. Go. Buy Matrimony: paperback or (yay!) Kindle edition. Comment below — it’s free!

The post Joshua Henkin: Some Thoughts on Book Groups, Book Sales, Book Review Sections, and the Publishing Industry – Part the First appeared first on Booksquare.