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?
Finding Mavis
Mavis Gallant, who passed away a year ago this February, published a total of a hundred and sixteen short stories in The New Yorker, which puts her on par with short story factories like John Cheever and John Updike. Yet by the time she died, she was penniless and alone, a fact which worried the few people in Paris who knew her well. In The Walrus, David MacFarlane examines what her writing meant to him. Pair with: Laurel Berger on her own fascination with the author.
Sky Dive From Your Desk
Betty Wants In and the Melbourne Skydive Centre have been churning out some simply amazing footage of sky divers, parachutists, and base jumpers. Check out their latest installment, Experience Freedom, and be blown away. (Previously: Experience Human Flight, Experience Zero Gravity.)
Tuesday New Release Day: Levertov; Tolstoy; Freud
New this week: The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov; a new translation of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich; and the complete letters of Sigmund Freud.
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Not Scenes
“They’re pictures, not images; displays, not shots; illustrations, not compositions. They are respectful displays of performance—of the demonstrative theatrical antics into which Anderson lets his performers lapse.” Richard Brody on the film version of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.
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Carlos Fuentes Passes Away
Carlos Fuentes, public intellectual and pivotal literary figure in not only Latin American but all of literature, passed away yesterday at the age of 83. Publisher’s Weekly recently interviewed the author about his forthcoming novel, Vlad.
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O. Brisky’s Book Sale
A friend of the late O.J. Brisky – longtime proprietor of Micanopy, Florida’s O. Brisky Books – is in the process of selling 100,000 of the man’s books, many of them rare.
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Can You Learn to Love the Adverb?
The saying goes that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs,” but at Beyond the Margins Robin Black makes the opposite argument. “I want you to love adverbs,” she begins, but “more than that, I want you to believe, as I do, that adverbs are the part of speech that best captures the human condition.”
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………..