John Warner writes: Focusing on the number of books sold is more likely to narrow, rather than expand the range of what gets published. I want publishing to be risky, and interesting, and as diverse as imaginable.
Books for sale at Volumes bookstore in 900 North Michigan Shops in Chicago in 2019. Real-world data about what books sell how many copies can be hard to come by.
Movies report the weekend box office grosses down to the dollar. Streaming services like Netflix can be opaque, but regular broadcast television has the Nielsen ratings. Spotify reports the number of streams, and if you go to YouTube or TikTok, the number of views counts upward in real-time.Bestseller lists rank order books, but they don’t come with actual sales figures.
Only 163 books, 0.4% of the total, sold 100,000 copies or more. We can guess, but we do not know which books those are., Melanie Walsh goes looking for, and finds, other sources of data about what books are read and by whom. Walsh coleads the Post45 Data Collective, a group that is trying to use open-source data to make cultural industries, like publishing, more transparent to the public.
This kind of quantification of something we suspect is true — that nonwhite authors are disadvantaged in the big publishing marketplace — can help publishers be more reflective and thoughtful about what they put into the world, and can help readers be more thoughtful about what we consume as well.
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