http://www.dystel.com/blog/2013/07/have-i-succeeded/ Mon, 26 Jun 2017 15:15:14 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.15 http://www.dystel.com/blog/2013/07/have-i-succeeded/comment-page-1/#comment-36346 Tue, 16 Jul 2013 22:20:14 +0000 http://www.dystel.com/?p=8988#comment-36346 As you said, Jim, success is in how much money a book can make. I’m not sure about patience, however, I heard it was Rowling’s publisher who leaked the story because her book was doing so poorly. It was ranked No. 4709 on Amazon – 24 hours later it’s No. 1. The writing didn’t change, the book didn’t change, but the dollars are now rolling in. Too bad they didn’t wait awhile longer to see if the book could have gotten momentum on it’s own rather than the Rowling name. After all, there was a reason for her to write under a pseudonym in the first place.

]]> http://www.dystel.com/blog/2013/07/have-i-succeeded/comment-page-1/#comment-36345 Tue, 16 Jul 2013 18:57:12 +0000 http://www.dystel.com/?p=8988#comment-36345 OK,interesting subject-I just got off the Deals section of PW where one of the burning news items is an Intermediate book about a suffering kid in the Sudan who learns to write and value herself through art, and it’s of course written in verse… Now we have to factor several things into this phenomenon; No.1 being that the agency which signed this thing is one of the biggest in town and doesn’t need the money that a financially succesful book would bring, and thus tends to select it’s authors on a totally whim-driven basis. No.2, they just might be cynical enough to figure that a lot of insecure parents and teachers might be guilt-tripped into buying this book, regardless of what Bart Simpson and Milhouse might actually think of it. And if this the case, we’ll have yet another bestseller which everbody buys and virtually nobody reads, which by our original calculus still spells success! Although I honestly think their motivation doesn’t go past No.1, to be honest.

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