Galley Friend J.E. sends us this wonderful link on the sales of Gawker's book, The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media. Between Oct. 2 (when it went on sale) and Nov. 1, the book sold--can you guess the number? I bet you can't. Go ahead and pick a number, I'll put the answer below in inviso-text:
242 copies
That's right. As Portfolio admits, that number may be an undercount by as much as 25%--but still. And for that, Gawker snagged a $250,000 advance. I don't get it. Are book publishers just stupid? That's what I've always suspected. Either there's a hidden logic to the industry which completely escapes me, or publishers routinely hand out giant advances to projects which have no chance of be being profitable, even when there's lots of prior history shouting, "Danger! Danger!" I mean, it's not like we haven't seen this before. The publishing industry seems about as rational as the music industry.
9 hours ago
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