November 11, 2010
Will the Reader Wait?
In case you’ve been in a hole (or just not on Twitter) for the last two days, you’re missing a very interesting debate over Johanna Skibsrud’s Giller Prize win for The Sentimentalists. Her publisher, Gaspereau Press, is on the record as saying they won’t take any extraordinary measures to meet the demand for the book: they will continue to print the books as they always have and fill orders as they come. This means an output of about 1000 copies a week. Given a “normal” Giller winner can expect to sell 60,000-80,000 copies, there is some debate over whether Gaspereau is robbing Ms. Skibsrud of a potential windfall.
It seems to me that the crux of the debate is whether or not the reader will wait. Do those books need to be on shelves next week? Or will the readers wait to read them when they can eventually get a copy? If Ms. Skibsrud will find her 75,000 readers over three years, that’s no big loss to anyone. But if the delay causes reader interest to wain, everyone stands to lose.
I am spectacularly naive about what generalizable groups will do. I can’t speak for “The Readers” anymore than I can speak for “The Voters”, whose motives and actions I manage to be blindsided by every. Single. Time. I don’t know if The Readers will wait, but limited evidence seems to suggest that they won’t.
Everyone I know was reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall last year. Nobody is reading it this year. The book hasn’t gotten any worse, in fact by all accounts it is ten time the book that Finkler Question is. Maybe everybody read it already? We aren’t selling the paperback of Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man, last year’s Giller winner. We only sell Late Nights on Air to students (who read it for Canadian Literature) and I’m not sure we even have a copy of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures in stock (ETA: we do, one copy, which has been there since 2007).
Actually, our customers don’t even look at our Canadian Literature shelves. They look at New Releases. I don’t think this is because they have already read everything in Canadian Literature, but I could be wrong. I have on occasion experimented by placing a new copy of an old book on a New Release display. This is a good way to sell books which have otherwise been sitting, gathering dust, for five years. Any bookseller can tell you this. Having your book “on display” rather than on a shelf is the best a writer can hope for, because the Reader seems to be drawn to shiny newness. Even the independent reader wants to be In The Know.
I hope for Ms. Skibsrud’s sake that Gaspereau is right, and the readers will wait for her. Certainly some will. With any luck that number will be enough to pay off her student debts and buy her a year or two of leisure time in which to write another beautiful book. If we need anything in Canada, it’s a solid class of working writers, undisturbed by a second “day job”. I have my fingers crossed for you, Johanna. I hope I’m as wrong about readers as I am about everything else people do.