Feinstein's new book

They are adjusted from BookScan. The BookScan numbers are lower and I bumped them up a bit because BookScan doesn't count all outlets (although it does count most). Season on the Brink sold several million, although that predates BookScan.

 

You have to purchase a subscription to BookScan to get the sales figures, correct?

 

yes, unfortunately

 

Sapient post. Except the "back end" does exist. It's where you take it if you agree to heavy royalty deal. Publishers are wonderful at showing exorbitant costs and expenditures and slow sales.

 

I finished it last night. Probably my favorite of Junior's most recent efforts. I think the one thing most of us in the business don't understand is that he's writing for an audience of an "average" sports mentality (pushing it for the NY Times best seller list). If you're a baseball fan, you'll enjoy the book ...

 

I think it's funny when I come across lines where he explains, for example, that the pitcher's mound is 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate. No stone unturned!

 

is there anything in the glavine section about his role during the strike in 94-95?

 

I haven't gotten too far in yet, but I'm assuming so. He mentions it in passing in the intro as one of the many intriguing facets about Glavine.

One annoying little anachronism - Feinstein keeps referring to the SAT as "the boards." Does anyone still call it that?

 

Writing a book a year requires an almost psychopathic work ethic. Even if they're not good books -- and I have no idea whether Feinstein's are good or not, having not read enough of them to judge -- they're still lots of words on lots of pages. Don't underestimate the discipline that takes.

 

I made 8 cents a word on a book I wrote, so I feel good now, since even I can manage more than one word per hour. If none of them words is too long, anyway. :-\

 

Mr Jones.

Having done three hockey books in three years (this one I'm taking off though I have a kids' book coming out) I'd probably qualify.

What I would say is that nobody -- not those who haven't written a book but want to, not those who publish books, not those who write them, not those who represent writers -- really understands the business and certainly no one can predict it. My last two books are inching towards Canadian best-seller status (which ain't much, 5,000 copies or so) and I will never earn a cent beyond their decent but not high-end advances. Yesterday I got the latest royalty statement on my first hockey book -- turned down by everybody but a little publisher that gave me all of $4K as an advance -- and to date it has sold 35,000 (almost 5,000 in softcover in the period of July 1 to Dec 31 of last year, fully two years after its original release). It's the nearest thing to a perennial. I figured Sidney Crosby would be a player but I couldn't convince anybody. There's just no knowing/predicting. It's all fortune's whims.

There are so many examples of things going unexpectedly boffo or bound-to-be-bestsellers flopping. Canadian cautionary tales: 1. One fellah I used to work with had the Ben Johnson bio signed up -- a world record in Seoul and it looked like he was sitting on top of a gold mine (for two days). 2. A respected Candian journalist did a full-blown business book on Air Canada and its sales were in the two figures. 3. Life of Pi goes on to win major international awards and earn its author seven figures was bought on an advance of $20,000.

It's just a wildly unpredictable business.

YD&OHS, etc