Brand Over?

There’s a pretty interesting though easily manipulated article out this week about how sales for A-List bestselling novelists like Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy are way down and the runaway hits of this year in publishing are contemplative, human-relationship books like Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Richard Russo’s Empire Falls. The author sights as evidence that sales for Crichton’s long-awaited new novel Prey are just so-so, and that Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Sue Grafton and Mary Higgins Clark’s recent numbers have been anemic compared to their astrnomical numbewrs of the past. In contrast, The Lovely Bones is still burning up the bestseller list (1.5 million copies and counting) and Empire Falls, a 483-page comic tale of live in a dying Maine town won the Pulitzer and sold a gazillion copies. It helps that both of them are fantastic books that I would recommend to anyone.

Those of us who love quality contemporary fiction would like nothing more than to seize this as evidence that the nation’s literary tastes are maturing and then to scream that fact from the hillsides. But look closer. The article’s author Lawrence Donagen sights several reasons for this trend that, with just a little poking, curl up into the fetal postion and cry “Stop stop!”

1. Donegan notes that the fiction-buying public in America is 70% female, an audience generally more interested in stories about people rather than stories about dragons and warcraft. But that doesn’t explain the equally perilous decline in sales for Sue Grafton and Mary Higgins Clark, both of whom have an overwhelmly female readership.

2. Terrorism, Osama, Saddam, the threat of war. Who needs fiction for high-tech military thrills when you’ve got CNN. True enough, but Donegan neglects to mention that sales in non-fiction books addressing these subjects have risen significantly. So it’s not that readers don’t read about what they can get on the news. They just read different sorts of books.

3. Price. Hardcover copies of new books are nearly $30 now, “steep in these recessionary times.” Sure, but the Lovely Bones is still in hardcover and that had stopped it. Also, King, Clancy, et. al. have wethered recessions before. That doesn’t indicate something is different about now.

4. The Oprah factor. Oprah’s now defunct book club and each of its spawn are signs that readers love to read en masse. That means they may be more willing to buy books from recommendations (even those recommended to the million viewers of a television show) rather than those inflated with publisher hype. One day, those may be one and the same but for now, Good Morning America’s “Read This!”, USA Today’s Book Club (both of whom benefited Seblad and Russo) have stayed away from big ticket, obvious bestsellers like Clancy and King.

That’s probably the strongest piece of evidence Donegan sites yet he props it up with a quote from Elaine Petrocelli, manager of Book Passage, a superb bookstore right outside of San Francisco. ”My customers are looking for quality, rather than a book written to order by some big name. The public is losing interest. Change is in the air.”

The “public” Ms. Petrocelli speaks of is Northern California readers, the largest per capita book-buying and book club-joining population in the nation. A wonderful sentiment yes, but hardly a respresentative sampling of the nation’s readers.

Look, I would like nothing more than to believe that we are entering a new literary golden age, where quality fiction gets the same attention, respect and marketing dollars as noisy blockbusters. I just want to gird a hope that big on firmer ground that Mr Donegan does.

• Category: Reading and Books