I was fine up until chapter five, then my brain exploded.
It would be kind of funny if the next donation includes ALL of those titles.
It’s been almost 30 years since “The Satanic Verses” came out, and the one person I can recall who said she read it (or tried to, anyway) gave up not very far into it and gave it to the library at the small town where she lived.
I read the Satanic Verses and liked it a lot.
But it’s a literary novel, not trashy throwaway stuff, so it’s not for everyone.
If it sold net 600+ units in your store alone, may all marketing campaigns fail as badly!
The analysis that I remembered similar to this was a story about the “average page citation” of Piketty’s work. The analysts compiled data showing the page # of the average citation of “scholarly” non-fiction works that have become best-sellers* (therefore, if you have two citations, one for page 2 and the other for page 100, the average page citation would be 51), with the hypothesis being that the earlier the average citation, the fewer people who actually read the complete work.
The Piketty book broke the record with the average page citation being page 29. The record was previously held by A Brief History in Time, which had an average page citation in the high thirties.
I’m pretty sure I read this on Business Insider, so that that for what you will.
*Brief History of Time, Godel Escher Bach… books like that.
Sorry, when I wrote this I thought you had sold “a thousand” and returned 300, but I misremembered.
Still - the marketing campaign allowed the publisher to book non-existent revenues for the fourth quarter, ensuring executives hit their bonus targets, so it wasn’t all a waste! 
By Jove! I think you’ve got it! 
Snooki of “Jersey Shore” fame had a book on the New York Times bestseller list. I’m sure many copies were bought by her fans. I doubt many copies got read.
True. In fact, the subject of “Best Selling Books Nobody Seems to Read” can be broken up into at least several categories.
- Literary novels written for a specific audience that inadvertently become best-sellers due to some controversy involving the author (e.g., Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” which resulted in Iran imposing a fatwa on him or Soviet dissident Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag” books);
- Academic books mostly written for upper-level and post-graduate college courses that unexpectedly find their way onto the best-seller list because they touch upon a then-hot socio-political issue (e.g., Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”); and
- Fad books. These can be fiction (the “Fifty Shades” series) or non-fiction (“Chicken Soup for the Soul”) and sweep through the publishing world like a hurricane only for the fad to quickly dissipate a few years later leaving behind millions of regretful purchases and stacks of volumes at used book stores.
Yes, for god’s sake, don’t imitate “Fifty Shades of Gray” it only sold 70 million copies, and who wants THAT kind of success?
But in their defense, most of them did look at the pictures.
Jwoww did too. I found a copy really cheap (can’t remember where) and put it in my antique mall booth for a while, and then decided to take it to a consignment shop. Don’t know if it sold there.
I just looked up “The Gulag Archipelago” on Amazon, and a condensed version is ranked at #41,212. Other editions have decent rankings; I’m very aware that it’s still on recommended- or required-reading lists for some students. The rank will probably rise a bit when summer school beckons.
4: Books with deliberately artificially inflated sales. Some organizations - Scientology has already been mentioned - will try to make a book appear more popular than it is by just buying them in bulk and dumping them unopened in a used book store somewhere.
Best time to read it is during the hottest part of the summer. Cools the body quickly and makes mowing the lawn much less of a chore
Not entirely true. Millions of people read much of the Bible. But there are whole books nobody ever looks at. Ask even a fundamentalist to explain what’s in the Books of Obadiah, Zephaniah or Nahum, and you’ll get an embarrassed shrug.
What I learned in my brief period of bestsellerness is just how FEW hardcovers you need to sell. No specifics, but IIRC it was in the very low four digits.
I’d expect that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich would be more popular, as it makes much the same points in a more easily digestible way. (And I’ve read both Ivan and the Gulag Achipelago so I do know whereof I speak.)
I bought “The Satanic Verses” when the controversy and fatwah were a Big News Item, in solidarity with Free Press and yadda yadda.
Then I tried to read the damn thing.
I have a degree in literature. I’ve read Russian novels where everyone has fifteen names and there are forty-three subplots. I read Victorian British novels for fun. I enjoyed Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Hundred Years of Solitude”.
I couldn’t read Rushdie.
Admittedly, I was very young and might do better now, but I’ve decided to leave Rushdie to others.
For whom… Trotsky? :smack: