Publishing wants debut authors to produce bestsellers. What happens if they don't?

When a debut author doesn't produce a bestselling book, it may signal the end of a career. This is due to the publishing industry's increasing obsession with books' sales data, even though the numbers are often inaccurate. 

What happens when the publishing industry focuses more on milking authors for cash rather than nurturing their craft? Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud discusses this conundrum with ECW Press editor Jen Sookfong Lee and writer Tajja Isen, who wrote an article for The Walrus about publishing's data obsession.

Elamin: Tajja, on the one hand, it makes sense that if your first book is not a success, they have a harder time selling the next one. It makes sense that publishers are a little bit cautious to go, "Should we take a risk on this writer again?" But you point out that this hasn't always been the case, Toni Morrison being a good example of this. Do you want to talk about the story of her first novel?

Tajja: So her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was very modestly published. The publisher didn't have massive expectations for it. It sold maybe 1,500 [or] 2,000 copies. And a few years later, it actually went out of print. And at the time, Morrison was working in publishing, very strapped for cash. And she happened to be working in the same building as Robert Gottlieb, who later became her editor, and he happened to have read the first novel and thought, "Hey, there's something to this writer. She's got some chops." He kept her in-house and published her second novel, published her third. And it was her third novel, with Song of Solomon, where she really broke out. So it was because her editor was able to nurture her across books that she had this incredible career that reshaped literature.

To read the full article on cbc.ca, click here