I came home from work the other day to find a small bubblewrapped package at my front door. It was addressed to John at the Not To The Swift blog. I always laugh when something comes to my house with Not to the Swift in the address lines as it reminds me that this twisted figment of my imagination, that I spend a good deal of my free time on, is actually real.
Anyway, I wasn’t expecting anything and the package seemed to contain some kind of hard object that was loose inside. Being the paranoid fool that I am , my first thought was that this can’t be good, after ruling out that this package was from the Unabomber, I gathered up the courage to open it. the package contained nothing more sinister than the paperback edition of T.D. Thornton's Not By A Long Shot along with a lucky horseshoe (I credit this horseshoe for helping me hit the Mauralakana trifecta at Gulfstream yesterday, $206 for a $1!).
I digress, I had read and reviewed the book here with a haiku-like brevity that would indicate I know nothing about reviewing books but being a blogger has side benefits; people send me things.
Since I started writing this blog, I have received t-shirts, books, CDs and DVDs in the mail. But more than anything I get books, three in the last year to be exact.
I have always been curious about just how well horse racing books sell,with the notable exception of Seabiscuit, I would venture a guess that racing books are not big sellers. So I asked T.D. how Long Shot sold and why he wrote it. The following is his e-mail to me, reprinted with his permission.
Long Shot sold pretty well, thanks for asking. When the hardcover version first launched last spring, we got a lot of good early buzz, and my publisher seemed pleased that a lot of it was generated at the grass roots level (ie, bloggers). I'm kind of learning as I go along as a newcomer to the book biz, but I was told to take it as a good sign that PublicAffairs wanted to spend some money and effort into retooling cover of the new paperback version. The sales reps feel this is a title that will have a fair amount of "shelf life" in paperback form, so it will be interesting to see how the re-launch goes.
Perhaps the coolest news I heard about book sales was that some locations here in Boston had to move copies of Long Shot behind the counter because customers were "liberating" them. It's kind of a twisted badge of honor to know there are racetrack degenerates out there who would actually steal a book rather than dip into their betting bankrolls-and as a fellow degenerate, I fully support such subversive behavior.
You raise a good point about the publishing industry only wanting toput out books that are commercially viable. And yes, for me at least, the whole process was a labor of love. I went 0-for-20 before PublicAffairs agreed to take a gamble on Long Shot, and I have a big, fat file of rejection letters that all essentially said "nice piece of writing, but we probably won't be able to make any money off it." In the end, PublicAffairs was a good fit for me because they are a smaller outfit with a big emphasis on quality, and they were quite liberal in giving me a degree of input over things many first-time authors don't usually have a say in (ie, editorial control, cover art, marketing plans).
I guess a good analogy would be to liken the publishing biz to the way a large-scale racing stable operates: Two years out, a publisher invests in 40 or 50 manuscripts that it thinks will be the next "foal crop" of books. Some of those new titles come with impressive pedigrees, but big-name bloodlines are no guarantee that a book will be a "Derby winner." There are always intriguing upsetters in the bunch, and at the end of a good year a publisher might come up with one champion (a best seller), a few decent allowance horses (books that sell well enough to make it into paperback), and some sorry steeds that never break their maidens (titles you see on the remainder table with their covers stripped off).
Best of luck, and please look me up at Suffolk if you are ever in Boston during the racing season.
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