Wow. Richard Ford is ending his seventeen-year relationship with Alfred A. Knopf and moving to Ecco. Big, big news.
This article is also useful because, as you know, I’m a bit obsessed by the mystery of sales figures. According to this article, Ford’s last novel, Lay of the Land sold “51,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales. In paperback, BookScan reported 36,000 copies sold.”
I, too, am vastly interested in the numbers. Readers for lit. and, even worse, poetry are remarkably small. And the time is RIGHT for short stories, poetry, novellas….yet few people are reading them. Perhaps the outreach by publishers isn’t strong enough?