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February 11, 2005
Really poor sales for some big business titles
Slate has an interesting article about James Stewart's DisneyWar. Author Daniel Gross projects great sales for this title, and from reading the New Yorker excerpt, it looks promising to me too, but what's really startling are the absolutely terrible sales record of many recent "business dramas." The lowlights are three books about the AOL/Time Warner merger: Fools Rush In, 5,000 copies; There Must Be A Pony In Here Somewhere, 3,744 copies; and Stealing Time, 9,176.
Even the top Enron book did only 70,000.
I can't verify his numbers, but still...even if this is bookscan data and 30% low, that's still pretty bad.
Daniel Gross lays the blame on media saturation and the lack of any real news in these books, and suggests that all the scandals and bad corporate decisions of the last ten years have somehow melted together in our minds.
My favorite Disney book remains Carl Hiaasen's Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World. Carl's not a very big Disney fan, and that's an understatement....
Posted by matt at February 11, 2005 7:58 AM