While perusing the Super Soaker fight between wingnuts and moonbats over CTG, I thought I'd see what a Google of "bookscan" would bring up. The Bookscan website itself is designed to deny anyone information that doesn't hand them cash in advance. They don't even give you preview porn.
So, grumbling, I clicked and pawed some more. Then I found
this Salon article from 2002 that I still think applies to CTG. It has information you need about sales, and Bookscan, and The New York Times Bestseller list. But it's the critics who warn about living by the bestseller culture that make the most important points:
"I'm not instinctively opposed to popularity," said Washington Post book editor Jonathan Yardley. "But it encourages readers and buyers to buy current books not of quality but of quantity. It encourages the herd instinct, and what usually rises isn't the cream."
and Pat Holt:
BookScan has a lot to tell us when it's used the right way," she said. "But we don't want to have to be limited by something that records only sales. Publishers are the caretakers of literature, that's how we get new writing, new ideas. If you publish for trends, it's just as bad as Hollywood. Majority rules does not have an equivalent in literature."
Matt Drudge reported that Crashing the Gate was a failure because of book sales, although he didn't do any investigation beyond a couple of mouse clicks. Had he done so, he would have found out one simple fact not stated enough about the book's sales. Bookscan didn't include the preorder sales.
As Markos mentioned more than once, CTG sold 5100 special edition copies. Added to 4402 Bookscan numbers, that's 9502 copies, and that doesn't include independent bookstores, i.e. their whole book tour.
Forget about what the meaning of "is" is. CTG is a success on Amazon, whether the sales are included in Bookscan or not (and I still haven't heard a straight answer on this). And CTG is a success in other ways not measured by book sales.
My hope isn't that Drudge will so much be proved wrong because he's only a tabloid journalist who reports gossip as the truth. My hope is that Drudge will be proved wrong in November because the right people will read the book and help change the Democrat's course to win some elections. The fact that more and more politicans are blogging here on kos, and the success of blog fundraising seems to be an indicator that the book is selling its ideas even better than the paper it's printed on. That seems to me to be the ultimate gauge of success from an author's standpoint.
There's a great quote from Tim O'Reilly, a modern pioneer in book publishing, that gives a statistic from Bookscan that shows how rare it is to be a successful author these days:
Authors struggle, mostly in vain, against their fated obscurity. According to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks sales from major booksellers, only 2 percent of the 1.2 million unique titles sold in 2004 had sales of more than 5,000 copies.
Jerome and Markos, welcome to the top 2% of published authors. If that's not a success in anyone's book, I don't know what is.