The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem

Companies keep betting on the next bestseller. Literature is poorer for it

In 1970, a New York publishing company put out a debut novel by an editor and former teacher from Ohio. The press, then known as Holt, Rinehart and Winston, had taken a chance on the book, which had been rejected by numerous other houses. The initial print run was somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 units—modest expectations that looked justified when, in the first year, sales barely cleared 2,000. This despite getting positive reviews in the New York Times and The New Yorker and being assigned to freshman classes at the City College of New York. The attention wasn’t enough. Four years later, the novel was out of print.

The author stayed in the game, albeit precariously. While working on her second book, she was a single parent commuting to Manhattan for a job in publishing. At the time, she was “so strapped for money that the condition moved from debilitating stress to hilarity.” Despite her first book’s lacklustre sales, she found a publisher for her second. The debut had attracted the admiration of a high-profile editor, one who happened to work in the same building she did. He acquired her next title, and the next, keeping her in house as she steadily built acclaim and an audience.

Eventually, the writer scored an opportunity still regarded as a grail of book marketing: her debut was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. Sales reportedly soared to 800,000 copies. Today, publishers hope that their titles will nab the book club stamp—and the ensuing bump in sales—straight out of the gate. But, in this case, the Oprah endorsement came only at the turn of the millennium, thirty years after the novel was first released. By then, the author had published some half dozen other books and cleared the stable of major literary accolades. She had won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, the Nobel. The author was Toni Morrison. The novel was The Bluest Eye.

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