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?
Tuesday New Release Day: Hensher, Smith, Morgenstern, Southgate
Booker-snubbed, but still widely anticipated, Philip Hensher’s King of Badgers is out today. As are Ali Smith’s There But for The, Erin Morgenstern’s uber-hyped debut The Night Circus, and The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate, who wrote here about writers’ work getting better as they get older.
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A Separatist Syllabus
How do readers recover from an abominable weekend but with a reading list, in this case one suggested on Twitter by Jay Varner, a writer and instructor based in Charlottesville. Varner links out to 12 articles about “why so many continue to believe an unequivocally false historical narrative surrounding the Confederacy,” including pieces by New Orleans’ mayor Mitch Landrieu, Slate‘s Jamelle Bouie, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose Between the World and Me made our roundup from last year of the best political fiction (yes, we do realize it’s decidedly not fiction).
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“How like a prison is my cubicle…”
In May, poet David Lehman wrote the first line of a sonnet about cubicle anomie and began crowdsourcing the rest. The completed 12-week project at The American Scholar is not merely a pretty great piece on its own, but a lesson in how to write one, line by line: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8/9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. You can submit your title suggestion as late as midnight on Sunday, but we suggest getting a start on it now, while the prison of work is still fresh in mind. (h/t The New York Times)
The New World hits virtual shelves
Chris Adrian’s The New World, a digital-platform book we wrote about before, is now on shelves. I mean that idiomatically and not literally — as none of the editions favored by The Atavist’s young publishing arm for this lyrical love story of life after death (interactive ebook app, text-only Kindle/iBook/Google) involve paper.
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Advice From The Hoary
“Me? He wants me to give him advice? But why? I still have no idea what I am doing. Then I realized that I did, at least, have eight more years of a writing practice that had run in tandem with a life of odd jobs, graduate school, starting a business, traveling, etc. I thought about an anecdote my friend Daniel once told me about what happened when Ian McEwan was asked to give advice to a young writer just starting out. He simply said, ‘Be successful.’” Catherine Lacey gives advice to a not-much-younger writer.
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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………..