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.
Comments
The real reason those numbers aren’t out there is because people have to pay for them, and no one wants to give up that advantage of having paid for them to people who haven’t.