Comments on: Anne Enright, the Booker and booksales http://eoinpurcellsblog.com/2007/10/24/anne-enright-the-booker-and-booksales/ It's that simple -- and that hard. And that inescapable. Fri, 25 May 2012 15:29:38 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Anne Enright, the Booker and booksales revisited « Eoin Purcell’s Blog http://eoinpurcellsblog.com/2007/10/24/anne-enright-the-booker-and-booksales/#comment-47440 Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:27:38 +0000 http://eoinpurcellsblog.com/2007/10/24/anne-enright-the-booker-and-booksales/#comment-47440 [...] wrote a little while ago about how well Anne Enright is selling here And how bad here reception was in [...]

]]> By: eoinpurcell http://eoinpurcellsblog.com/2007/10/24/anne-enright-the-booker-and-booksales/#comment-37820 Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:33:30 +0000 http://eoinpurcellsblog.com/2007/10/24/anne-enright-the-booker-and-booksales/#comment-37820 Sarah,

I’ll accept that I may have overplayed my hand a little. I was speaking in the knowledge of just how tough it is for a literary work to make an impact in the current market.

I’ll happily accept that there are authors that will outsell her handsomely (JK Rowling sold about 150,000 copies of HP7 between adult and children’s editions). I wouldn’t dream of disparaging any of the other best selling author, and yes true crime will probably outsell literary fiction in a straight fight.

All in all, even when she had only sold 2,000 copies, Anne had done well in a tough market for literary fiction. Had she not won and tricked just over the 10,000 mark for the whole year, it would have been a very, very good performance for a literary author.

Eoin

]]> By: Sarah http://eoinpurcellsblog.com/2007/10/24/anne-enright-the-booker-and-booksales/#comment-37810 Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:13:42 +0000 http://eoinpurcellsblog.com/2007/10/24/anne-enright-the-booker-and-booksales/#comment-37810 Hi Eoin,

While I agree that any author selling 7000+ copies in Ireland is doing very well, I think it is stretching it a bit to say that this makes her one of Ireland’s best selling authors. The likes of Paul Howard, Marian Keyes, Rachel Allen, David McWilliams can sell in the region of 20,000+ and most true crime authors sell at least 5000-7000.

I am not trying to take away from Anne’s success and I agree that the journalist in the Indo obviously knows nothing about book sales, but I think describing 7000 sales as ‘top-selling’ ignores the fact that there are several Irish authors who can sell many multiples of that figure, albeit not in the same genre as Anne Enright.

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