How to Become a Best Seller
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Perspectives HOW TO BECOME A BEST SELLER BY ROBERT LEKACHMAN ON EASTER SUNDAY, a holiday I customarily ignore, I became moderately famous. The April 11 New York Times Book Review informed...
...Socialism Hill Make You Rich?No1 Well, back tothetypewriter...
...I inscribe copies...
...Let us brood together upon these matters...
...Trailing behind are Book World, the Washington Post's Sunday supplement...
...Still, one can have too much even of an excellent phenomenon...
...Although Time ignored me (I don't read it either, so there...
...Although good luck, a catchy title (mine was an inspired suggestion from my editor and his wife), and endorsements from the eminent are essentials of commercial success, they probably are not by themselves enough...
...The situation is delicate...
...The early warning signals that surface in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and The Library Journal are brief and often pungent...
...In general, the book business has been slow to dreadful for the very reasons which have generated my modicum of commercial success.In better days sales of 25,000 or so copies would not elevate any book to the sacred best seller list...
...Books do not arrive in bookstores entirely, or even mostly, because erudite booksellers place discriminating orders with publishers...
...Should the downward slide proceed too far, potential readers will lack funds to acquire my illuminating interpretation of their situation...
...The time was right, the sales effort substantial and the advertising visible...
...But assume that all has gone well up to this point and the stores have ordered half the initial printing, in my case 15,000 copies...
...Part of the answer, perhaps most of it, has been supplied by my astute friend John Kenneth Galbraith in the amiable blurb my publishers sensibly placed on the dustcover: "The only thing better than this book is its exquisite timing...
...Pantheon is a division of Random House, along with Vintageand Knopf...
...There is a twist to the review process...
...In the trade's two seasons, spring and fall, Random House emits approximately 400 new titles...
...two of Time Inc.'s book clubs, the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Fortune Book Club listed my tract as an alternate selection...
...Your devoted editor's task is inducing the sales representatives to talk enthusiastically about your candidate for stardom instead of rivals...
...Needless to say, each host, whose knowledge of a given book varies from imperceptible to considerable, mentions the product at least once every eight minutes or after any commercial break...
...Truth to tell, I'd be willing to be Number One...
...Random House used to be owned by RCA and now belongs to the Newhouse newspaper chain...
...Here the sales conference plays a crucial role...
...When the manuscript is delivered, frequently later than promised, the relieved editor needs to convince his colleagues and superiors that it merits publication in a sizeable initial printing...
...Worse, was John Ehrlich-man, whose Witness to Power completed the list in the Number 15 slot, a more virtuous soul than myself by the criterion of lesser popularity...
...Among them, pearls of great price!, were several nationally distributed programs—William F. Buckley's Firing Line, CBS Evening News, and CBS Morning News...
...The April 11 New York Times Book Review informed marketing students that my new book, Greed Is Not Enough: Rea-ganomics (Pantheon, $13.50—Advertisement), had become the nation's 11 th best-selling hardcover, nonfiction work, according to the computerized testimony of 1,600 bookstores...
...A skeptical lot, the salesmen have heard it all before...
...All of its divisions rely upon a single sales force to coax the bookstores into stocking up in advance of publication...
...Librarians and retailers, especially chains like Dalton's and Walden's, pay attention...
...Perilous indeed is the path of the solipsist...
...So, it is alleged, do television and radio appearances...
...Number one, after all, was Jane Fonda's Workout Book...
...At each one, my book will be mentioned...
...Be confident...
...With such highly profitable exceptions as the interchangeable contributions of a Robert Ludlum or a Harold Robbins, each manuscript is a unique commodity that presents new problems of advertising and marketing...
...Let me temper naive euphoria with a cold douche of reality...
...A fact: During the week following my best-seller listing, Pantheon sold 4,000 copies, mostly to wholesalers whose stocks had been depleted by bookstore orders...
...Radio and television, of course, fill many of their empty hours with guests more than eager to talk about their books, recitals or plays...
...Time, Newsweek, and the few large metropolitan dailies that pay even cursory attention to new books...
...Petersburg, and so on...
...those that tactfully confine themselves to praise, but bad reviews are preferable to no reviews—the depressing fate of the vast majority of the more than 40,000 (yes, 40,000) new titles annually presented to an apathetic public...
...How does the title of my work in progress grab you...
...They are composed from galleys and made available weeks or even months before publication...
...Advertising at the minimum tells the booksellers that the publisher is confident enough about sales potential to bet a bit of additional money...
...On the first score, long before an idea is bound between covers and reaches your local Brentano's or Doubleday's, a series of sales missions need to be completed...
...Let the word be heard in Middle America that at age 62 notoriety is still a possibility...
...A Few Minutes with A ndy Roon-ey came in third, When Bad Things Happen to Good People—billed as "Comforting thoughts from a Massachusetts rabbi"—ranked fourth, Bess Meyerson's The I Love New York Diet seventh, Weight Watchers 365-Day Menu Cookbook eighth, and Joyce Brothers' What Every Woman Should Know About Men—identified as "Counsel from a pop psychologist"—tenth...
...Publishing is a notoriously unscientific enterprise...
...locally, I have appeared on the NBC, ABC and WOR channels...
...Imagine my joy when an occasional citizen completes the identification and introduces him or herself to me...
...The publishers sell their lists to the book retailers...
...Since January, I am startled to realize, I have graced or disgraced 14 TV shows...
...Is this the disgraceful explanation of my enrollment in the society of New England theologians, media personalities, and counselors to the corpulent and sexually hesitant...
...Wholesalers and retailers can return at any time unsold copies for full credit...
...One or two publishers have attempted to modify this expensive and dispiriting practice, but the return privilege remains nearly universal...
...Is this the sort of company you would like your sister's book to keep...
...NO MATTER...
...Day after tomorrow, I speak in celebration of self (in the company of Wilfred Sheed, carrying out an identical mission) at a Book and Author Luncheon in Port Washington, on Long Island's affluent North Shore...
...Other ingredients of the best seller include personal persuasion, response from the review media and the author's willingness to hustle his own merchandise...
...As for the reviews, some of the least public are very important...
...No question that unemployment and spreading bankruptcy are good for my sales...
...Yet economists are a traditionally glum lot...
...Reviews count...
...The Wall Street Journal, whose reviewer hated everything in my book including its title, and Barron's Weekly denounced me...
...Usually editors and sometimes authors themselves summarize new books and present or invent reasons why they should be pushed...
...If, against reason, the strange Reagan mixture of assault upon the poor, tax benefits for the rich, corporate deregulation, military build-up, and tight money had worked, no recession would have occurred and my poor book would have marched with scarcely a pause from the warehouse to the remainder tables...
...All authors admire intelligent reviews, i.e...
...Isn't there something faintly discreditable in emerging from honest obscurity to the glare of public attention...
...And on the very day that Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's tepid review emerged in the daily Times, the Op-Ed page, bless its inspired editors, featured "An Agenda for the Left," a substantial excerpt from my final chapter...
...People even stare at me in the street, visibly struggling to connect me with an image on the tube or a name on a page...
...Nobody can really be sure what makes a book sell...
...It is an old story that appeals to avarice, sexual triumph, perpetual youth, personal beauty, and power over others sell books in clumps...
...Numerous radio, TV and speech opportunities loom on the horizon...
...Fair warning to new authors: All sales are tentative...
...The very uncertainty naturally impels avaricious authors to appear as frequently as they can in as many contexts as possible...
...I astonish no one when I declare my intention to press on...
...Newsweek, the Washington Post, Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, and the Newspaper Enterprise Alliance commended me...
...Of the general review media, the New York Times Book Review carries most weight...
...The aspiring writer must persuade an acquiring editor that the mysterious residents of bookland will pay for the work about to be written in numbers large enough at least to cover the advance and the cost of printing...
...The most intriguing assault appeared in the New York Times Book Review...
...This is no more than the beginning...
...Next question: Will the customers do their bit...
...I am gracious in my acceptance of praise...
...Which is only to say that as I feverishly typed away last summer and early autumn, I tacitly gambled that by the time the finished product hit the bookstores in early February, the economy would be in as poor condition as in fact it was, is and threatens to continue to be...
...That leaves us to explain how a polemic like mine, promising not wealth but an analysis of how Ronald Reagan plans to make most of us poorer, has managed to extract $13.50—or a somewhat smaller sum at Barnes & Noble—from uncoerced customers...
...My 16 radio contributions feature Barry Farber, Casper Citron and Henry Morgan, to cite the better known New York talkers, plus a clutch of out-of-town stations in Minneapolis, Boston, Grand Rapids, Detroit, Tampa, St...
...Am I a "pop" economist...
...Although I have written or edited 13 books and contributed essays to two or three dozen volumes compiled by friends and colleagues, not a solitary one of those selfless contributions to public enlightenment had become a bestseller during the three decades preceding that historic spring day in 1982...
...My angry tone evoked approval from reviewers of enlightenment who share my detestation of Reagan and all his works, and rage from the great man's supporters...
...These are usually call-in affairs and, to judge from the general drift of questions and declamations, favored by the elderly and conservative...
Vol. 65 • May 1982 • No. 10
