Check this out

http://ipods.freepay.com/?r=30075209

The meek shall inherit the earth... and by that, we mean a handful of soil...

The Guardian revamps how it calculates it's end-of-year bestseller lists, and explains why in this interesting look at the mechanics of bookselling.

In horse-racing terms, the book trade is a bizarre inverted handicap in which the runners with pedigree and form gain all the advantages, while the outsiders have extra weights heaped on their backs. This is particularly evident at Christmas - a festival, ironically, promising the eventual triumph of the meek - when the main contenders potentially rejoice in a triple boost of slashed prices, in-store promotion and multi-buy offers.


Home

Edited by author 09-15-2005 01:20 PM
Australians would rather starve than read The DaVinci Code

A diet book is causing a stir in Australia and consequently outselling Dan Brown. Apparently, if you eat only one softcover a week, you're good to go. Great marketing strategy, no?

More than 60 per cent of Australian adults, or 7 million people, are overweight, with 2 million of those considered obese, while nearly a third of children are either obese or overweight.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found that overweight and obese people cost the country more than $1.2 billion in 2000/01.

Yoiks.

Home

Bestseller lists: a woman's world?

I can just here my dad now. That's just great, first he chooses poetry, and then he chooses being male... Wait. Um... Let's be honest. I didn't choose this. I was born a poet.


Home

The store I most often shop at stocks Bukowski, but he hasn't got an inordinate amount of space. Dante's got way more, the prick. I've even got a few inches, but that's probably because I signed all of their copies of my book, so they can't return 'em. This might be a clever guerrilla tactic to use on Head's empire....

Mine wasn't meant as a snooty dismissal. I haven't read as much Bukowski as I'd like, or enough to be snooty. I know I've been surprised more than once to find those 'top of his game' poems. That said, in a bookstore with about 6 yards of shelf space for poetry, I'm still stunned to see him accorded 1/6th of that space.

And yes, Jewel or Molly Ringwald are more depressing names to see at the top of the bestseller list.

Bukowski's not the problem with a poetry bestseller list. Pop stars like Jewel leave Buk and Rumi drinking together in the dust. Then comes Maya Angelou. Selling poetry's no place for a weak stomach.

Or you could do what I do and stay the fuck out of Chindigo altogether and just let them morph peacefully into a yuppy department store.

How much Buk have you read, Chris? Though he did publish a lot of crap (both during his lifetime and posthumously), he was a brilliant poet when he was on his game. I get pretty tired of hearing snooty dismissals of his work, which seem to me to be based more on the fact that his books sell and on his image as someone read (and shoplifted) by 20 year old men than on his writing.

Thank you. That's how I felt. It felt ghettoized and infantilized at the same time.

Ooh, I feel a letter writing campaign coming on. That, or we could concentrate on world hunger. One of the two.

G

"Poet's Corner" strikes me as condescending, yes, but more than that, a different sign from the others segregates poetry from "regular" categories of books - in a bookstore! It would be interesting to check the independent bookstores and see how they design signage, and check them out for consistency.

It may sound like overanalyzing signs, but I've done a lot of work on signage projects in my day job, and consistency is essential, and a very basic element at that. "Poet's Corner" would have stood out to me too if I'd seen it, and not just because I'm a poet!

Aside from not wanting to know, it's a whole helluva lot of work, better suited to someone with computer programming skills. ie, not me.

G

P.S. I was just in an Indigo (I feel so dirty) at Bay and Bloor and noticed that the section signs were all pretty standard (Fiction, Biography, Candles and Yoga, etc) except for poetry. It read, "Poet's Corner".

Well, aside from that fact that it's not in a corner, it struck me as kind of condescending. Is this just my natural distaste for Head and her amoeba or is it actually condescending?

It's never better not to know, just easier. Anyone who passes through whatever wardrobe leads to the poetry section of any Chimptigo should be able to deduce that Rumi outsells Roo, prizes and all, by the number of copies on the shelves. I'm still stunned by the idea that Bukowski merits about a yard of shelf space.

That said, I'd like to see poetry bestseller lists, overall and Canadian, even if 'bestseller' means 10 copies a month some months. Commercial success haunts so many discussions of what poetry "should" do, who it "should" appeal to, that the raw data might be fascinating.