Nothing is more pathetic than an author sitting at a card table surrounded by unsold copies of his latest book while watching humanity pass him by in front of a book store in a crowded mall.
    For several weeks, I have been pathetic.
    Potential readers turn their eyes away, picking up their pace as they jog past the card table, avoiding me as if I were the lead locust in the upcoming 14 year plague. With humor, sarcasm, even pleading, I call to them. Most have innovative reasons why they don’t want to enter the bookstore. “I don’t got time to read” is one of the more popular ones.
    To accommodate them, about 25,000 books have been condensed and placed onto two-hour audio cassettes that allow almost-readers to shove a tape into a car cassette and do autoaerobics in morning rush hour traffic. More than 90 million American adults are functionally illiterate, placing the U.S. as 49th of 158 nations, according to a United Nations survey of literacy. There may be no correlation here, but the average time in front of a TV set is about seven hours a day; the average time reading a book is about seven minutes.
    But people do wander into bookstores. Fixing my targets, I cheerfully ask what kind of books they like, pitching my book to fit their needs. Usually they ask for directions to the cookbooks. In the Kitchen With Rosie, by Oprah’s chef, has sold almost six million copies. The Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Cookbook, hyped by ads in all major newspapers and on the 10 million Forest Gump videos, hit more than 700,000 in sales last year. Entertaining With Regis & Kathie Lee, as syrupy as you’d expect, was also a big seller. Even Menus for Entertaining, by flighty Martha Stewart who once told America to leave an inch of snow on the ground to beautify their estates, made it onto best-sellers lists.
    Once, I tried to explain to a 30ish woman covered by peroxide and makeup that my book of short columns was a humorous look at some serious social issues, but she slapped me with reality—“Oh, no! I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I read your book. Those kind make me so upset.”
    “Go ahead, try it!” I implored. “I’ve even read it twice myself.” When there was only a blank look, I sent her into the Romances.
    Romance readers, led into illusory bedrooms by Danielle Steele and Janet Dailey, spend about $1,200 a year on their bodice-ripper tales of poor writing told by women with Anglicized bylines who can follow a lame plot formula and write quickly—or, if you’re Barbara Cartland, dictate three to four books at a time to secretaries.
    Romance readers are often soap watchers. A book about what goes on behind the scenes at TV’s “General Hospital” made it to the racks in time for a hefty Christmas sale. However, one of the most popular books the past year was a diary by a soap character—not the star who plays her, but the character herself. Robin’s Diary, more lurid and as superficially revealing as anything on daytime TV, has easily outsold The Diary of Anne Frank.
    Also outselling Anne Frank’s diary is The Sensuous Woman, by “J,” which has seduced more than 10 million Americans since 1971, well ahead of any book by a Nobel laureate. When William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, every one of his novels, none of which had sold more than 2,000 copies, was out of print. In 1995, Beavis and Butthead’s Ensucklopedia sold more than 400,000 copies, more than books by Peter Benchley, E. L. Doctorow, Joseph Heller, Jack Higgins, John Irving, James Michener, and Herman Wouk.
    Readers want to buy books from people they know, or think they know. Books by actor-comedians Ellen DeGeneres, Paul Reiser, and Tim Allen, and singer Dolly Parton have each had sales of more than a million copies in the past two years. On a day when I was selling a handful of books in Wilkes-Barre, cross-dressing radio shock jock Howard Stern was two hours away in Philadelphia deluged by 15,000 sales of Miss America, significantly ahead of Colin Powell who managed a one-day sale of almost 3,500 copies, and Newt Gingrich whose best one-day sale was 1,800 copies, still about 50 times more than the average writer sells at a bookstore stop.
    If it’s a diet-and-exercise book by a TV or film star—Suzanne Somers, Jane Fonda, and even Angela Lansbury have told us how to look wonderful—bring out the SuperCray megacomputers to figure the sales.
    The books don’t even have to be well-written. Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County, which could have used a covey of copyeditors, sold more than six million hardcover copies and stayed on the Publishers Weekly best-sellers list for 161 weeks. Books by and about O.J. Simpson also hit best-sellers lists during 1995 and 1996, making millionaires of lawyers and hangers-on whose prose fit literature as badly as undersized gloves.
    Fortunately, many best-sellers deserve their status. With a first printing of 2.8 million hardcover copies, John Grisham’s The Rainmaker set an industry record. Not far behind was Michael Crichton’s The Lost World. However, the average first novel sells 2,000-4,000 copies, not enough for either the author, who earns about 10 percent of the book price, or publisher to make any money. The break-even point for most publishers is 5,000 copies. With the Industry spending seven-figure royalty advances and six-figure promotion budgets on just a few authors, most of the rest of us don’t even get a chance to see our books published, no matter how well written and insightful. Those that are published are usually buried in a promotion budget the size of a business executive’s conscience. It’s just a matter of economics in an industry that has seen conglomerates cannibalize each other, and just 10 publishers place 94 percent of the year’s best-sellers. All that matters is the bottom line—“Can it sell?”
    From mall-sitting, I realized that the peroxided, made-up 30ish lady was right. The public wants books about social issues about as much as the impoverished living in tenements want household roaches. It’s “How-to” books, cookbooks, romances, self-help books, celebrity tell-alls, books about diets and exercise, sex and intimacy that the people want. As soon as I finish this column, I’ll be starting my next book, a guaranteed best-seller, How to be Your Own Best Friend While Sensually Baking Diet Pornographic Cookies with Bill Clinton.

Copyright 1998 Walter M. Brasch