Do any of you remember in the late 80s, early 90s when RT used to have a monthly spread of some author’s palatial estate? Times have changed a bit. The NYT business section reported yesterday while Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep sold 133,000 in hardcover and 329,000 on a $40,000 advance, Prep’s second novel, The Man of My Dreams has been a disappointment. To date, it has sold 36,000 copies in hardcover and 6,000 in paperback while the advance was several multiples of the Prep advance.

It doesn’t look like Sittenfeld is quite on the McNaught track. At least not yet.

One of the more interesting points in the NYT article was that publishers do little to no market research, depending solely on sales to determine what to buy, what to push, what to sell. We readers clearly see that as publishers pushed regency romances on us until we gagged on them, followed by the vampire glut, and soon we’ll be done in by shamans, shapeshifters, witches, and threesomes.

One publisher noted that bloggers have a much better idea of what their readership wants and that before Amazon, publishers had no clue what readers thought of books. Guess what I’ll be blogging about tomorrow?

Related posts:

1. National Bestselling Fantasy Author Sharon Shinn Opens Home on the Web
2. Janet Evanovich succumbs to the collaboration madness
3. Perseus Hopes to Gain from PGW’s Loss