Ficlets

The New York Sun has an article called How Not to Write a Bestseller, which essentially shows how, despite all the attempts by writers and publicists to make a book a bestseller (in this case Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris), some books just don’t make it onto the New York Times bestseller list, and thus are, you know, failures.

My immediate response to this is that most authors would strangle their siblings to have the sort of “failure” Mr. Ferris is having, which includes having 50,000 copies of his book in print, is in its fourth printing, and HBO Films making a movie of his book, for which Mr. Ferris is attached to write a screenplay. One could very easily get used to that sort of non-success; alternately one can realize that one can be quite happily successful even without ever appearing on a best-seller list.

I’ll give you an example. Until very recently, my most successful book, in terms of numbers sold, was The Book of the Dumb, which is a humor book about people doing stupid things (and us, the readers, pointing at them and laughing). It’s sold more than 60,000 copies, which is a very healthy number of books, and is still selling quite well, especially around the holidays. However, a large portion of Dumb’s sales were through stores like Costco and Sam’s Club, whose sales are not tracked by compilers of bestseller lists. They went unnoticed on the lists because of it – but not unnoticed by the book buyers (or by me, when I got my royalties).

It’s nice to be on a bestseller list, to be sure. But even when you’re not, you can still sell well as a writer, still make a good living as a writer – indeed, still be successful as a writer. A sense of perspective about these things is a good thing.