The Valve - A Literary Organ | The Norton Anthology and The Case of Duckie’s Missing Brain and the man who killed SF anthologies

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Friday, February 10, 2006

The Norton Anthology and The Case of Duckie’s Missing Brain and the man who killed SF anthologies

Posted by John Holbo on 02/10/06 at 12:41 AM

I - or we - appear to have accidentally produced a variant on the standard googlebomb. Go to Amazon and check out the entry for Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Scroll down to ‘customers who viewed this book also viewed’ and you get ...

* Theory’s Empire : An Anthology of Dissent by Daphne Patai
* The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism: Instructor’s Manual by Vincent Leitch
* Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms (Theory/Culture) by Irena R. Makaryk
* The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave Histories of Literature) by Adam Roberts
* Tuff Fluff : The Case of Duckie’s Missing Brain by Scott Nash

The first three are sensible enough, the fourth is a bit coincidental if not due to our occasional links to Adam’s book. The fifth, I figure, has got to be due, somehow, to provides us with a more interesting window on literary ecology. He links to a wikipedia entry on one Roger Elwood, the man who killed SF anthologies, apparently. “By the time Roger Elwood was finished, you couldn’t have sold an SF anthology into the North American market if it were priced at ten cents and made out of Godiva chocolate.” If you read Dave’s comments, it turns out the un-wiki-like phraseology is due to (envelope please) Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Someone should ask Moretti what he thinks of cases like this - Elwood, not Duckie’s Brain. “Prior to that time, anthologies and collections were very popular with readers, and were considered by the publishing industry to be a surer bet than novels. Roger Elwood ended that, singlehandedly breaking the story collection/anthology market. It has never wholly recovered. He squandered industry credibility accumulated over decades by better anthologists, and wrecked the readers’ faith in collections.” What do you think?

Comments

Been there, done that.

By Scott Eric Kaufman on 02/10/06 at 09:17 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Presumably all it takes is a few people clicking on the same items ...

Must you shatter my dreams? Can’t you allow me to believe that amazon construct these lists out of blitzkreig sales of said titles in the hundreds of thousands?

By Adam Roberts on 02/11/06 at 04:36 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Well, I certainly looked up Duckie on Amazon, not to mention Adam’s history, and TE. And, as someone who’s watched the Amazon rankings for a few items quite closely for longish periods of time, I can say it only takes one sale or two for a book to jump thousands of steps in those rankings. It’s a most interesting and peculiar system.

By Bill Benzon on 02/11/06 at 06:44 PM | Permanent link to this comment

While I’m thinking about, for the next book event I think someone should start tracking the book’s ranking a good week or two before the event and then keep doing so, daily, through the event and for a week or so after. The idea is to see if there’s a spike in sales that can be attributed to the Valve event. I didn’t start tracking Moretti’s sales until after the Valve event began. And there’s also the problem that anyone attracted to his book by the even could get it for free.

By Bill Benzon on 02/11/06 at 06:46 PM | Permanent link to this comment

I was thinking the same thing, Bill. I have an Amazon associates account, and I moved two copies of Moretti, just for the record. It’s nice that giving things away is apparently compatible with selling at least some things.

By John Holbo on 02/12/06 at 08:50 AM | Permanent link to this comment

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Friday, February 10, 2006

The Norton Anthology and The Case of Duckie’s Missing Brain and the man who killed SF anthologies

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