Sillybean

Breaking news: publishers’ math “fuzzy.” Film at 11.

The current issue of Entertainment Weekly has an amusing story about the court case between Clive Cussler and the studio who made Sahara. Here’s the part that made me fall out of my chair (emphasis mine):

More pointedly, though, the producers also accused the novelist of lying about how many fans he actually has. ‘’Sahara didn’t get the audience it should have for two reasons, both of which are Mr. Cussler’s responsibility,’‘ says Crusader’s lawyer Alan Rader. ‘‘First, before the film was made, he bad-mouthed it to his fans. And second, he didn’t have nearly as many fans as he claimed. He claimed he had sold 100 million books. Turns out that’s a lie.’‘

Actually, what Cussler’s publishers have been boasting about — at least in blurbs on the back of his books — is that he has 100 million copies in print. And that’s one of the more eye-popping revelations to come out of this trial — that the book business is every bit as fuzzy with its math as the film industry. Nobody publicly reveals how many of those 100 million volumes sent to booksellers have actually been purchased, let alone read. And nobody at Crusader bothered to do any tabulating on their own before signing the deal. ‘‘Cussler and his agent said they had 100 million books sold, s-o-l-d,’‘ says Rader. ‘’[Crusader] believed the people they were dealing with.’‘

‘‘The book industry is almost working the way it did when Charles Dickens was alive,’‘ says industry expert Albert Greco.

Hello? Are you seriously telling me that I, and everyone else who’s read Writing & Publishing 101, know more about publishers’ accounting practices than the movie studios who are signing deals on book adaptations?

SRSLY?!

I’m not even going to go into the claim that Sahara failed because Cussler was a dick about it and not because it was a bad movie. EW did that on their own. Instead, let’s quickly recap the myriad stupidities of trying to equate number of books sold to number of fans:

1. used book stores
2. libraries
3. loaning books to friends

1. people who bought the book, hated it, and loaned it to friends or traded it in to the used book stores

And yet, it comes as an eye-popping revelation to both the movie studio and Entertainment Weekly — who, at least, should know better — that no one knows how many fans a book has.

I’d say the real news here is that Hollywood executives have no fucking clue how the world works, but the punchline there is pretty much intrinsic.