DAVID LEHMAN
373
record-setting advance for the industry-wide perception that
Whirl–
wind
flopped miserably. "It would have had to have been an atomic
explosion to live up to people's expectations," Hughes says. "In the
cold hard world of book publishing, the book made money for its
publisher. It just wasn't the super bonanza it was meant to be." The
hardcover ed ition has sold "in the neighborhood of 600,000 copies,"
which sounds like a n awfu l lot of copies - until you recall the size of
the advance a nd the million-copy expectations it aroused. "It's too
bad that so much emphasis is placed on the author's advance and not
on the aut hors themselves," Hughes adds, though he concedes that
the
Whirlwind
a uction did nothing to diminish that trend.
The trend goes back to the sky-high paperback auctions of the
late 1970s, when the ante kept getting raised on glitzy page-turners
hawked by super-aggressive agents. Ever since then, there's been a
headline-happy, show-biz aspect to the formerly tweedy-seeming
book business. Bidding battles have made trade publishing seem a
sexy species of Wall Street speculation. Sexy but dangerous , because
the market can crash on a n overpriced property. The publication of
David Stockman's
The Triumph oj Politics,
for example, involved a
grave miscalculation. Put it this way: Stockman's inside view of the
first Reagan Administration came out about a year after people
seemed to lose all interest in the subject. To advance $2.4 million on
the book, as Harper
&
Row did, meant that somebody over there
had banked on selling nearl y a million copies. That's quite a gamble.
What happe ns if you miss your bet-as, by all accounts,
Harper
&
Row did on
The Triumph oj Politics.)
That depends ; some
disasters hurt much worse than others. I like the rule of thumb pro–
posed to me by a self- effacing ed itor at a major house (not Harper
&
Row): "Nobody's ever ha ppy about a book failing, but you're not ter–
minally unhappy if you think the book's spectacularly good. Those
are the breaks. The terrible thin g is when a book fails and you never
gave a shit about it in the first place but you did it because you
smelled money." Perhaps somebody at H arper
&
Row thought
Stockman's book was spectacularly good. It's possible .
Is trade publishing growing ever more dependent on such
megabooks? Yes a nd no . A healthy number of any season's best–
sell ers were acqu ired with modest expectations . On the other hand ,
the major houses can't afford to stop chasing hot properties. It's a
function, as publishing people like to say, of the "economies of scale":
the bigger you a re , the higher your overhead, the more best-sellers
you need every year just
to
break even. "The competition for the big
