Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

David Blum, writing in The New York Sun, had an essay earlier this week entitled “How Not To Write a Best Seller.” The essay takes a look at Joshua Ferris’s recent debut novel, “Then We Came to The End,” which received rave reviews earlier in the year (including a front page review in The New York Times Book Review, which is just about as good as it gets). But the book — while the publisher has shipped 50,000 copies, going back to press four times — never became a sensation and never really caught on, and this makes Blum curious: “Why does the reading public not know Mr. Ferris’s life story the way it so often becomes familiar with young literary lions? Why have comparatively few people heard of his novel, read it, or embraced it as the discovery of the season, if not the year?”

In terms of reviews, since Ferris’s book did just about as good as a novel, first or otherwise, could hope to achieve, Blum then ties the book’s only respectable reception to “the industry’s recent hand-wringing over the elimination of book-review sections in newspapers.” Because if book reviews are so important, and without them no one will know what to read (as recent supporters of book reviews have stated), how come they don’t work? Why didn’t Ferris’s book sell even more? Why isn’t it a spectacular success? In the words of Blum, “Something doesn’t compute.” What doesn’t compute is that reviews, in and of themselves, don’t automatically make a book a smash. Instead, reviews are only one part of an equation that adds up to success. And, as we may be discovering, reviews may be a smaller part of the equation than we previously thought.

NY Sun: How Not To Write a Best Seller