The only question about Sarah Palin’s future in book publishing is how many jobs she will save in the industry this holiday season by giving booksellers across the country the unexpected gift of a runaway bestseller.
One of the first industries to be hit in a recession is trade book publishing, “trade” denoting books sold directly to the public and libraries (as opposed to text books).
Bestseller lists traditionally measure the velocity at which titles are moving from the shelves through the cash register. It does not count books sitting on the shelf, waiting for someone to buy them.
A secret group of independent bookstores and chain bookstores are periodically chosen, for example, by The New York Times, to report the sales of their top selling titles for the week.
With computers and online shopping, however, bestseller lists can be updated hourly, and the bestseller lists we are speaking of are Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, both of which are reporting that the #1 bestselling book in America is GOING ROGUE, by Sarah Palin, despite the fact the book does not yet exist.
How can this be? Because readers are purchasing the book online, which clocks the paid pre-order as a regular, in-store sale at the cash register. (The accounting tool is the unique ISBN number [International Standard Book Number] of every published book that has made instant sales reports possible.)
So what does this all mean? At the moment, that HarperCollins is delivering an unexpected fiscal miracle to booksellers for the fall and support for Sarah Palin, as an individual, may at last be somewhat accurately measured across the country.
