Continuing that series of posts and links about contemporary fiction, here’s a piece in Slate about how book sales are measured and ignored:
[Using Bookscan to garner sales numbers] has become popular for a few reasons having to do with the culture of journalism and publishing. In general, the publishing world treats money the way old-line WASPs once didâ€â€as a subject that genteel people simply don’t discuss. The only question considered to be more indelicate than how much one was paid to write a book is how many copies it has sold.