Laurel
Kitty Mama
- Joined
- Aug 27, 1999
- Posts
- 20,692
I read this article in the recent issue of The New Yorker, and then ran to my computer to search it out on their website because I'm too damn lazy to type it out. It discusses the power of Prizes in the world of Literature. Here's the link for those interested:
http://www.newyorker.com/THE_TALK_OF_THE_TOWN/THE_FINANCIAL_PAGE/
Here's the article:
* * * * *
In 1958, Pantheon Books published a translation of a very long novel by a Russian poet—a hard sell, especially in the duck-and-cover U.S.A. Anticipating some indifference, Pantheon printed just four thousand copies. Later that year, however, the Russian poet, Boris Pasternak, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and people everywhere decided that this very long Russian novel, "Doctor Zhivago," was worth a look. "Doctor Zhivago" went on to sell a million copies in hardcover and five million more in paperback. That Nobel helped transform Pantheon from a small-time publisher into a real profit-making house.
In publishing, as in Hollywood, winning a major prize often dramatically improves sales and profits. After being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year, Jhumpa Lahiri's short-story collection "Interpreter of Maladies" became a best-seller, and its publisher, Houghton Mifflin, reissued the book in hardcover. Orders for Ha Jin's "Waiting" rose tenfold after it won the National Book Award, in 1999, and sales of Alice McDermott's "Charming Billy" tripled immediately after it won the award, the year before, even though it had already been in stores for ten months. "The day after you win a prize, the orders just come in fast and furious from the wholesalers, chains, everywhere," Janet Silver, the editor-in-chief at Houghton Mifflin, says. "You end up scrambling to get enough books into the stores."
The consensus among editors and publishers seems to be that literary prizes have become more important in the last decade, as publishers and booksellers have grown more adept at taking advantage of them. Heidi Pitlor, an editor at Houghton Mifflin, says, "The more opportunities we have to put a gold seal on the cover of one of our books, the better."
Literary prizes matter even more abroad. In France, winning the Prix Goncourt virtually guarantees that a novel's sales will climb from several thousand to several hundred thousand. To drum up publicity, the French publishing industry has created an awards season—a handful of prizes, announced in the course of a few weeks each fall, with the Goncourt as the centerpiece. Consequently, a great many French novels are published around that time, in the hope that they will be vivid in the minds of the judges. In Britain, the winner of the Booker Prize routinely gets a tremendous boost, and that's essentially the point: the Booker explicitly guarantees its winners "a dramatic increase in book sales." Little wonder, then, that, after Vikram Seth's novel "A Suitable Boy" failed to be short-listed for the prize, Seth's agent sent one of the judges a simple note: "May God and literature forgive you."
The Goncourt and the Booker are also set up to facilitate the kind of lobbying that Harvey Weinstein is infamous for. In France, the list of judges barely changes from year to year, and most of them are writers who are published by one of the big houses. Yves Berger, a senior editor at the publisher Grasset, once said, "The impartiality of jurors is anyway a purely theoretical concept." But, with rare exceptions, there's no lobbying of judges in America (the list of Pulitzer judges is kept secret), and even the controversies are mild. "I just wish the awards in America were more fun," one editor says. "I'd like to see some blood on the floor."
One reason prizes are more important than ever is that competition for consumers' attention has grown so fierce. In 1999, a hundred and twenty thousand books were published in the United States—that's about fourteen per hour, which is a lot, especially when there's so much good stuff on TV. A book is the quintessential "experience good"; you can't tell from simply looking at it whether you'll like it (the way you might with a television set or a pair of socks). With many such goods—a Big Mac, say, or a bottle of Zima—one experience is enough, but with books the fact that you liked one is no guarantee that you'll like another. When you are trying to decide what book to read, you're in a state of "information asymmetry." You know less about any given book than its publishers do: they, presumably, have read it; you haven't. And the cost of your making a mistake (in reading hours, if not in dollars) is high.
So you must seek out other cues, whether advertisements, book reviews, or word of mouth. One of the most authoritative is a seal of approval from what economists call "independent information providers." A 1999 study in the Journal of Advertising found that an endorsement from, for example, the Pulitzer committee, Consumer Reports, or Oprah can make people who have no opinion of a product suddenly see it as top of the line.
Indeed, the less information consumers have about something, the more they're forced to rely on such third-party imprimaturs. This helps explain a curious fact about American literary prizes: they generally help relative unknowns much more than stars. Michael Cunningham, Carol Shields, Pete Dexter: all saw sales skyrocket after winning major prizes. But when Philip Roth got the National Book Award for "Sabbath's Theater," in 1995, sales barely budged. On the face of it, this makes no sense. If you buy prize-winning books because you want to read the best books, you should be just as likely to buy one by Philip Roth as one by Carol Shields. But because readers knew less about Shields the prize mattered more.
If the publishing industry wants to be more economically productive (a big "if," perhaps), here's a modest proposal: give prizes only to first novelists and obscure authors. It would be accolade alchemy, spinning medals into gold.
— James Surowiecki
http://www.newyorker.com/THE_TALK_OF_THE_TOWN/THE_FINANCIAL_PAGE/
Here's the article:
* * * * *
In 1958, Pantheon Books published a translation of a very long novel by a Russian poet—a hard sell, especially in the duck-and-cover U.S.A. Anticipating some indifference, Pantheon printed just four thousand copies. Later that year, however, the Russian poet, Boris Pasternak, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and people everywhere decided that this very long Russian novel, "Doctor Zhivago," was worth a look. "Doctor Zhivago" went on to sell a million copies in hardcover and five million more in paperback. That Nobel helped transform Pantheon from a small-time publisher into a real profit-making house.
In publishing, as in Hollywood, winning a major prize often dramatically improves sales and profits. After being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year, Jhumpa Lahiri's short-story collection "Interpreter of Maladies" became a best-seller, and its publisher, Houghton Mifflin, reissued the book in hardcover. Orders for Ha Jin's "Waiting" rose tenfold after it won the National Book Award, in 1999, and sales of Alice McDermott's "Charming Billy" tripled immediately after it won the award, the year before, even though it had already been in stores for ten months. "The day after you win a prize, the orders just come in fast and furious from the wholesalers, chains, everywhere," Janet Silver, the editor-in-chief at Houghton Mifflin, says. "You end up scrambling to get enough books into the stores."
The consensus among editors and publishers seems to be that literary prizes have become more important in the last decade, as publishers and booksellers have grown more adept at taking advantage of them. Heidi Pitlor, an editor at Houghton Mifflin, says, "The more opportunities we have to put a gold seal on the cover of one of our books, the better."
Literary prizes matter even more abroad. In France, winning the Prix Goncourt virtually guarantees that a novel's sales will climb from several thousand to several hundred thousand. To drum up publicity, the French publishing industry has created an awards season—a handful of prizes, announced in the course of a few weeks each fall, with the Goncourt as the centerpiece. Consequently, a great many French novels are published around that time, in the hope that they will be vivid in the minds of the judges. In Britain, the winner of the Booker Prize routinely gets a tremendous boost, and that's essentially the point: the Booker explicitly guarantees its winners "a dramatic increase in book sales." Little wonder, then, that, after Vikram Seth's novel "A Suitable Boy" failed to be short-listed for the prize, Seth's agent sent one of the judges a simple note: "May God and literature forgive you."
The Goncourt and the Booker are also set up to facilitate the kind of lobbying that Harvey Weinstein is infamous for. In France, the list of judges barely changes from year to year, and most of them are writers who are published by one of the big houses. Yves Berger, a senior editor at the publisher Grasset, once said, "The impartiality of jurors is anyway a purely theoretical concept." But, with rare exceptions, there's no lobbying of judges in America (the list of Pulitzer judges is kept secret), and even the controversies are mild. "I just wish the awards in America were more fun," one editor says. "I'd like to see some blood on the floor."
One reason prizes are more important than ever is that competition for consumers' attention has grown so fierce. In 1999, a hundred and twenty thousand books were published in the United States—that's about fourteen per hour, which is a lot, especially when there's so much good stuff on TV. A book is the quintessential "experience good"; you can't tell from simply looking at it whether you'll like it (the way you might with a television set or a pair of socks). With many such goods—a Big Mac, say, or a bottle of Zima—one experience is enough, but with books the fact that you liked one is no guarantee that you'll like another. When you are trying to decide what book to read, you're in a state of "information asymmetry." You know less about any given book than its publishers do: they, presumably, have read it; you haven't. And the cost of your making a mistake (in reading hours, if not in dollars) is high.
So you must seek out other cues, whether advertisements, book reviews, or word of mouth. One of the most authoritative is a seal of approval from what economists call "independent information providers." A 1999 study in the Journal of Advertising found that an endorsement from, for example, the Pulitzer committee, Consumer Reports, or Oprah can make people who have no opinion of a product suddenly see it as top of the line.
Indeed, the less information consumers have about something, the more they're forced to rely on such third-party imprimaturs. This helps explain a curious fact about American literary prizes: they generally help relative unknowns much more than stars. Michael Cunningham, Carol Shields, Pete Dexter: all saw sales skyrocket after winning major prizes. But when Philip Roth got the National Book Award for "Sabbath's Theater," in 1995, sales barely budged. On the face of it, this makes no sense. If you buy prize-winning books because you want to read the best books, you should be just as likely to buy one by Philip Roth as one by Carol Shields. But because readers knew less about Shields the prize mattered more.
If the publishing industry wants to be more economically productive (a big "if," perhaps), here's a modest proposal: give prizes only to first novelists and obscure authors. It would be accolade alchemy, spinning medals into gold.
— James Surowiecki
