Is all publicity good publicity? Are all reviews—even bad ones—good for books? The answer, according to a new study [pdf] by the journal Marketing Science, depends on whether the writer is well known or unknown. The study examined the impact of a New York Times review on the sales of more than 200 hardcover titles. For books by established writers, a negative review led to a 15% decrease in sales. For unknown authors, a negative review increased sales by a healthy 45%.
Is All publicity Good Publicity?
French Fiction
Recommended recommendations: Nancy Kline surveys recently translated French novels for the New York Times Book Review. Pair with our own Bill Morris's piece in the Daily Beast on the 2014 Nobel Prize Winner Patrick Modiano and "Why American's Don't Read Foreign Fiction."
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“He’s like a Shakespeare.”
How do you “challenge Muslim stereotypes” in film? Add more white actors. The director of a biopic about 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin al-Rumi hopes to have Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. star in the film.
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Editor Wanted
A highly sought after editor position is about to open up. Philip Gourevitch is relinquishing the helm of the Paris Review. Perhaps I'll throw my hat in the ring. Gourevitch wants to spend more time on his writing.
For Tom Waits, Drink Everything
Do you like listening to music, but often struggle with an appropriate drink order? Enter Drinkify, a website which suggests cocktails based on the tunes you’re playing. (I tested it out with The Wu-Tang Clan. It told me to drink “1 bottle of gin.” Do with this information what you must.)
‘Lost’ Novel Found
Does it come as any surprise that Lost creator J.J. Abrams would write a book that his editor describes as "the most high concept novel I have ever come across"?
The type of bad publicity is relevant as well. A bad review is probably on the lower-intensity end of bad. On the other end of the spectrum would be something like the Cooks Source plagiarism scandal. Prior to the bad publicity, very few people had heard of Cooks Source. However, as a result of the bad publicity, the magazine as forced to close after all of the sponsors pulled out.
Hmmm. Keep in mind that established authors get much harsher bad reviews than new ones–the NYT has no interest in taking an unknown author and ripping them to shreds. The paper only reviews an unknown work if they see something valuable in it, though the reviewer may dislike the work overall. But the NYT does not hesitate to take a famous author down.
Also worth noting that established authors likely to have larger week one sales and preorders to begin with — and an inevitable sales drop in weeks two and three.
Depends if you have a secondary market I think. Good or bad publicity for product A for instance might have x10 the effect of product B sales. Not as simple as people say maybe………..