Books that sold a million or more

Abstract

T he panel discussion that follows will focus on books that have sold millions of copies--books, in other words, that are among our era s bestseUers, books that have clearly reached what we in the industry think of as mass markets. If you look at them, however, you'll see at once that they're not what we call "mass-market books" Indeed, if you look for them on today's bestseller lists, you'll look in vain, for reasons I'll go into in a moment. The panelists will deal with five titles: How to Teach Your Baby to Read, published by the Better Baby Press; the Samuelson-Nordhaus Economics, published by McGraw-Hill; Apples of Gold, published by the C.R. Gibson Company; The Merck Manual, published by the Merck Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories division of Merck & Company; and, viewed collectively, the Garfield books, published by Ballantine/Del Rey/Fawcett. We assembled this panel because we, at the Center for Book Research, were curious about books that reach millions of readers. We were curious for two main reasons. In the first place, we believed that such books could serve as object lessons for people in the book world, who are always eager, of course, to know how to generate sizable sales. We wondered whether sales of a million or more copies result when an author creates irresistible work and some editor simply recognizes it for what it's worth. Or do editors deserve more credit? Does a sales figure up above a million mean that an editor spotted the potential of an author's work--which may have been quite resistible when the editor first saw i t -and that the editor shaped a manuscript to realize that potential? Does any of the credit go to design and production people, and if so, how much? Or is it marketing that matters most? And if marketing is the key, then does success derive from the conventional build-a-best-seUer scenario, with its reliance on ever-widening circles of boosters in the trade? Or do books make it big as the result of imaginative new marketing strategies? Or because of something else entirely? Is timing all-important? Is luck?