Bookplanet: the challenge of promoting literary fiction

Promotional Intelligence
By RACHEL DONADIO

The pride and joy of publishing, literary fiction has always been wonderfully ill suited to the very industry that sustains it. Like an elegant but impoverished aristocrat married to a nouveau riche spouse, it has long been subsidized by mass-market fiction and by nonfiction ripped from the headlines. One supplies the cachet, the others the cash.

The divide between sales of literary and commercial fiction has always been vast — the 345,000 copies that Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 novel "Gilead" sold in hardcover and paperback is an impressive figure, but not when compared with the more than 18 million copies of "The Da Vinci Code" in print in North America, and more than 60 million worldwide. These days literary fiction has to contend with two factors that are increasingly central to the publishing process: timing and volume. In a market dominated by the big chain stores, if a novel doesn't sell a healthy number of copies in the first two weeks after its publication, its chances of gaining longer-term momentum are slim.

"The whole system is set up for impatience," said Drenka Willen, an editor at Harcourt whose authors include Umberto Eco and José Saramago. That "system" also favors the familiar name over the new voice.

"In the post-9/11 world, we've found it has, until very recently anyway, been more difficult than previously to get the common reader to take a chance on new writers," said Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which publishes Jonathan Franzen and Nadine Gordimer, as well as Marilynne Robinson. "The pressures on literary books are growing, as an ever smaller number of books continues to sell more and more broadly."

Indeed, in 2005, almost half of all sales in the literary fiction category came from the top 20 best-selling books, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks sales in 70 percent to 80 percent of the domestic retail market. The three top sellers in literary fiction were "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," by Mark Haddon (640,000 copies in Bookscan's sampling); "Memoirs of a Geisha," by Arthur Golden (560,000 copies, including the movie tie-in); and "The Known World," by Edward P. Jones (274,000 copies).

This top-heavy pattern makes promoting literary fiction a challenge. "You need 15 things to happen in the right order on time," said Bill Thomas, the editor in chief of Doubleday-Broadway, whose recent successes include "The Curious Incident," as well as Jonathan Lethem's "Fortress of Solitude" and, yes, "The Da Vinci Code." Those things include drumming up enthusiasm inside the publishing house, spreading the word to booksellers and reviewers by sending out manuscripts months before publication, and securing a front-of-store display at Barnes & Noble and Borders and prominent placement on Amazon.com . To show booksellers you're serious, Thomas said, you have to ship a minimum of 20,000 copies to stores at the time of publication.

But literary novels rarely sell that many copies in hardcover, and the need for a high print run sets up expectations that can be difficult to meet. Printing 20,000 copies off the bat also requires the commitment of the entire publishing apparatus. To get "in-house support" for a book, editors vie against one another to win over the marketing and art departments so the book gets advertising dollars and the best jacket possible. That means literary fiction editors are increasingly called upon to become businesspeople and lobbyists. "The stereotype of the introverted book editor scribbling away in a dimly lit office may have once been true, but now if you're that way, your books fail," said Geoff Shandler, the editor in chief of Little, Brown, which publishes Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace.

Today, "it's a zero-sum game and the publisher knows they can only push so many titles per season," said Eric Simonoff, a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit whose clients include Jhumpa Lahiri and Edward P. Jones. "There's an enormous amount of internal triage that goes on. Rarely is a publisher surprised at the success of a work of fiction." That doesn't mean their best efforts always bear fruit. "A lot of preplanned successes turn out to be flops," Galassi said. Benjamin Kunkel's "Indecision" sold 19,000 copies from its release last August through the end of April, according to Bookscan — a respectable figure for a first literary novel, but disappointing for such a heavily promoted title (though it was much discussed in literary circles, which to some is the true measure of success).

After the internal lobbying, publishers turn to winning over the single most powerful person in American literary publishing. No, not Oprah , but a woman you've probably never heard of: Sessalee Hensley, the one literary fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble. (Other buyers handle romance, mystery and additional genres.) Publishers are reluctant to talk about Hensley on the record, for fear of jeopardizing their rapport with the gatekeeper to a company with 799 stores and 17 percent of the United States book market. But most say they respect her judgment, even if they sometimes complain she has middlebrow taste. Hensley can decide whether to place a book on an attention-grabbing front table and often advises publishers to change a book jacket. (The company wouldn't make her available for an interview.)

It's a delicate dance: buyers use a writer's past sales to determine how many copies of a new novel to order; publishers try to convince buyers that a book has potential even if they can't justify spending the money to promote it the way they would a commercial title. Publishers frequently argue for the bottom quarter of their list — the books that get the least marketing support and often sell the fewest copies. That's "where the major writers of the future usually start," Galassi said. "It's where much of the best writing is, the work of the odd, uncooperative, intractable, pigheaded authors who insist on seeing and saying things their own way and change the game in the process. The 'system' can only recognize what it's already cycled through. What's truly new is usually indigestible at first."

With so many factors in play, it's hard to know what makes a book take off. "When I started, I used to think it was 80 percent hard work on the part of your author and 20 percent luck," said the literary agent Nicole Aragi, whose authors include Jonathan Safran Foer and Monica Ali, young writers who have broken out of the pack. "Now, I think it's 50 percent hard work and 50 percent luck." To promote novels, publishers often seek "nonfiction hooks" to draw readers in. "The Plot Against America," by Philip Roth , a major literary event when it appeared in 2004, has sold extremely well — 412,000 copies so far in hardcover and paperback, according to Bookscan — in part because it was seen as an oblique commentary on the Bush administration. (The normally reclusive Roth also made his first American television appearances since 1968, on the "Today" show and PBS's "Newshour.") It's not enough to say a book is "beautifully written and ambitious and wonderful," said Janet Silver, the vice president and publisher of Houghton Mifflin, which publishes Roth. You have to find "different ways of talking about a book that go beyond its intrinsic merit."

Publishers will often use a writer's background to promote a book. But taken to the extreme, this places more value on the writer's pedigree than on the quality and originality of the prose. Consider the case of "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," a first novel whose intense marketing strategy emphasized that the author, Kaavya Viswanathan , was a photogenic 19-year-old Indian-American Harvard sophomore. It was pulled from stores last month by its publisher, Little, Brown, after Viswanathan was accused of recycling from multiple sources. It soon emerged that the book had been delivered to Little, Brown by a packager who encouraged Viswanathan to aim for broad commercial appeal. But these days, even established editors have been known to advise literary novelists to tailor their plots and characters to the presumed appetites of the public.

It can become a vicious circle: publishers lament that literary fiction has trouble finding a foothold — then flood the market with overhyped and often derivative work in the hope of meeting some vague idea of reader expectations. In the end, what will rescue literary fiction from the crushing commercial demands of publishing today is exactly what has always sustained it: the individual writer's voice. There is, after all, a difference between a reader and a market.

(Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the NY Times Book Review.)