Talk about a strange cultural pairing.
It would be difficult to think of a better example of mainstream American entertainment than the hit ABC show “Lost,” about plane-crash survivors on a mysterious island. Last season, an average of nearly 17 million viewers watched the Emmy-winning show’s 25 episodes. As many or more are expected for the second season.
By contrast, the Illinois-based Dalkey Archive Press is famous in literary circles for publishing experimental and avant-garde books. The firm is lucky if it sells 90,000 books in a year.
Story continued here.
good news?
Let’s hope they can handle the production costs. I seem to recall a small publishing house in England getting swamped by an unexpected hit some years ago.
Re:good news?
This article was from last year and the episode has come and gone. We should know by now if there was a blip in sales or if they are stuck with thousands of extra copies.
Heard about book yesterday
I was listening to NPR yesterday and they mentioned the book the “Third Policeman” and that sales were being impacted by the mention on the show. I used Google to retrieve an article about the show and the book. Because of the NPR mention I thought this was something that had just happened so I didn’t even think to check the date of the article. The sales rank on Amazon was 5,000 yesterday and 2,000 today. The mention on NPR was probbaly responsible for the bump in sales. Any exposure a book can get seems to help sales.
Re:good news?
Ah! Good to know.
Re:Heard about book yesterday
Heh. When I read this story yesterday, I looked at our catalog, and only one of our six copies (systemwide) was checked out. Now I look and see that four of those have holds on them. Looks like NPR did its job!