Come on, you can write that you read it "in hardcopy" and offer no
link "because it's behind their paywall" - but that's just
unfriendly to your readers. You don't even offer the date or author
of the article in your post.
You can find it here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116096270338293504.html from the
Monday, October 16th WSJ by Jeffrey Trachtenberg.
The article is not an analysis of publishing stats. It's a story of
one book that tried to make it big and didn't.
You tee off on the only paragraph that's over the top in the
article. But the real gist of the article is about how publishers
perceive that they need to find blockbusters, but it's a
risky game to play. In the end, it's a story about the danger of
blockbusters and the power of the long tail. It ends with this
paragraph:
"On Sept. 20, when the bad news about Mr. Rubenfeld's book was
coming over the transom, Venezuelan President Hugo
Ch�vez gave a speech to the United Nations. He
held up a copy of Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival: America's
Quest for Global Dominance" and praised the book, which shot up the
Amazon best-seller list, prompting the printing of an additional
50,000 copies to meet demand. Mr. Chomsky's publisher: Henry Holt
& Co."
That's the same Henry Holt & Co. that tried to publish the
blockbuster piece of fiction that the article is about. And the
Chomsky book was originally published back in 2003.
Don't cherry pick paragraphs that you vigorously disagree with when
the full article is nothing close to the how you paint it.
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