A few months before Soccer Dad came out, an Ohio soccer mom put out Surviving Soccer—a very different book for a similar audience. Karen Scholl’s is a humor book—a comprehensive send-up of the bizarre behavior and deranged thinking of sports parents who think they are normal. People like me and Scholl.
Now, Scholl is writing about the bizarre behavior and deranged thinking of authors who think they are normal. People like Scholl and me.
She’s captured a lot of what I’ve been writing in my “Sales Mode” series here, about the endless rabid relentlessness required to publicize and promote a book, and the rewards. In a recent Substack account of a torturous yet triumphant book-signing appearance at the American Library Association show in Chicago, Scholl hit on an aspect of this process that “Sales Mode” hasn’t touched yet. She wrote:
But you know what people say to you when your book comes out? How’s it selling? Seems innocent. Kind, even. Here they are asking about something that’s important to me. And yet it feels like a small, polite stab. Wasn’t it enough that I wrote a book and got it published? Now you want to know how many copies I’ve sold? Truthfully, I don’t actually know. I’m not sure I really want to know. I only know enough to know it will never be enough to brag about. You know?
Asking an author, “How’s it selling?” is like asking a long-unemployed person, “How’s the job search going?” But also, not asking, “How’s it selling?” is like not asking a long-unemployed person, “How’s the job search going?”
You worry you’ll wound ’em either way.
No, you won’t. Especially the author, who like Scholl, generally doesn’t know how the book is doing in any way that will satisfy a questioner, because the vagaries of book sales are full of delayed reporting from variously reliable channels, all with their technical caveats. It’s all shadows on cave walls. The best I can tell you about Soccer Dad is that “the publisher seems happy” and that sales in June exceeded sales in May (I am pretty sure), which indicates momentum is building since the launch, rather than falling off (I am pretty sure).
Yes, comes the reply, but what about the numbers? Here’s the problem with the numbers. The only numbers anyone has ever heard about books are about books like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which has sold “millions of copies worldwide,” and (mostly because it’s taught in schools) sells 125,000 copies a year, according to my close friend AI Overview. How about The Shining? “Exact figures for Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining are difficult to pinpoint, as the publishing industry does not publicly disclose raw numbers. However, early hardback sales are widely cited as approximately 700,000 copies …”
So how is it going to sound to you that my book is selling several hundred copies per month? Or, that I’d be pleased if it got up to 3,000 this year, in hopes that enough of those 3,000 love it so much they’ll recommend it to others, and so we maybe sell another 1,000 every year until—I don’t fucking know, why don’t you just tell me what I want to hear: That you enjoyed the book (if that’s true), and that you were glad to see it got covered in The USA Today. I didn’t write this book to make money, I wrote it to communicate with people. I want to talk what people are saying about it, not how many of them bought it.
If my book starts selling really well, you’ll be the first to hear it—probably from my interviewer on the Today Show. Meanwhile, please just hope it sells well enough to meet the Sisyphean goal I had for it going in: that a publisher wants me to write another one sometime, and that I come up with another idea worthy of another five years of my life.
Oh, and speaking of which, that’s the other question you don’t ask a recently published author: “What’s your next book?” Unless you’d also ask a mother in the recovery room what she’s going to name her next baby, and when’s it coming out.
(It’s also possible I’m getting a little brittle, after all these months of promoting Soccer Dad like it’s the Holy goddamn Bible. The other day a friend had the accidental temerity to suggest that Soccer Dad‘s good sales might have something to do with the World Cup. I threatened to drive over to his house and shit in his driveway.)
