the hopeless quest for the perfect comp

As they sift through all the information we give them on new titles, booksellers say that “good comps” are their best tools for deciding what and how to order.   But like everything else in the book industry, it’s complicated.

We put our house up for sale this week.  When it came time to land on a price, the process had some surprising similarities to bookselling.  It turns out that no matter how unique and special your house may be (and ours is naturally spectacularly unique and couldn’t be more special), the most relevant factor is the comp, which is to say the price at which similar homes in the area have recently sold.   

“Price is a moving target,” our real estate agent and neighbor Tammy explained.  This means that no matter how much intangible charm you’ve got, no matter how much debt you’ve gone into to fix the place up, and no matter how much every amateur armchair real estate expert says it’s worth, it’s actually worth what similar nearby houses happen to have sold for very recently.

It’s a frustrating business to have to reduce a much-loved residence to a check list of features: square feet, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms (one-yikes), yard (or not), condition of kitchen, garage, school district.  All of the other factors count (Twenties arts and crafts bungalow with one of a kind details!  Gorgeous boulevard!  Cool little eyelid windows in the attic!) But not as much as a solid comp.

So what’s the book connection?  Like a unique home, the one of a kind text is also a commodity, and thus reducible to a checklist of features:  subject, author, page count, illustration count, price.  Before saying yes, the bookseller wants to know what other books she has sold are “like” the new book I’m presenting.  

Reps and publishers spend lots of time and energy preparing these comps.  To be effective they have to be accurate, not wishful thinking.  And they have to be more than the result of an Amazon subject search.  The importance of this key piece of information predates the digital age, but now that a bookseller can simply click on comparable titles as we move through the catalog, noting how well they did, it’s essential.  A truly great comp is the Holy Grail. 

But I have the nagging suspicion that we sometimes rely too much on comparable titles, that they sometimes lead us from the essential uniqueness of every book.

Five types of comps are especially reliable:  the previous cloth edition of a new paperback ; the previous editions of a new edition;  a previous title by the same author;  other biographies on the same person; volume one of the volume two which is new this season;

 

But even these seemingly ideal comps can be problematic.  When I started in bookselling a paperback would routinely sell twice the number of hardcovers, but that formula is now long obsolete.  Much can change between editions of a reference book in terms of sales, especially since the advent of the internet.   An author’s previous books, which would seem to be a good rule of thumb to predict sales, are often on subjects so far afield  (or are so old) as to be meaningless.We routinely pitch biographies with handles like “first book on Mr. X in 75 years.”  No comps there,  .And even using sales on volume one to predict sales on volume two isn’t as reliable as it once was.  (Ask your bookseller how they did with the follow-up to last year’s extraordinary Letters of Mark Twain vol 1)

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The gold standard for truly reliable comps might be something like the Whitney Biennial Catalog, which Yale publishes every two years.  A bookseller who checks sales on the 2008, 2010, and 2012 editions should have a pretty good idea of what to do with 2014  Though even in a case like this, fluctuation in art book demand makes it a guide, not a mandate. 

Like the comps for my house, book comps can be misleading, or at least incomplete.  A comp might reference other books on the same subject which had a similar number of pages, similar selection of illustrations, and similar price point- with no measure for whether it was actually a better book or not!  But this is one thing the rep is for. 

If a comp is good enough, I’ll sometimes make it the centerpiece of my pitch.  When Yale UK Sales Manager Andrew Jarmain described his approach to a new biography by saying “Sutherland does for Whistler what Ellman did for Oscar Wilde,” it was a twofer- a concise handle and a good comp.

But chasing comps too desperately can be a kind of fool’s errand.   There are so many caveats and specific circumstances in the sales life of any book that comparisons seem more like a wish than a science.   The shelf life of a new book now six to eight months.  The precise demographic that wanders into the store and sees the new book is never exactly the same as the one that bought the similar title two years ago.

We have a great new biography of Stephen Crane on the spring list.  The previous biographies are pretty old and nobody will have a useful sales history on them.  So I suggest checking sales on Red Badge of Courage, his best known work.   But is that really a good comp?  Maybe.

The Americanization of Narcissism, also on the spring Harvard list, has one perfect, appropriate comp: Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism.  This book was a sensation when it came out decades ago, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.  But the title draws a blank with many younger booksellers, and it’s often fallen out of active backlist and hasn’t sold recently.  So my most effective comp is worthless.

Like real estate prices, comps are a moving target- I add and subtract from my list as I go through the selling season.  And booksellers are an excellent source of new comp ideas.  I rarely get through a season without stealing a few original ideas for comps from one bookseller and using them on another.

Sometimes a comparable title pops into my head like an earworm.    Saskia Sassen’s new book Expulsions somehow brings to mind Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine every time I start talking about it, but it’s not similar enough to suggest it will sell that way.  A new title about Josephine Baker’s bizarre attempt to assemble a “rainbow tribe” of multi-racial adopted children all but screams Michael Jackson’s Neverland, but I’m reluctant to cite MJ (what book?) as a comp.  Yet the first bookseller I called on this season said it’s the first thing he thought of when he saw the book.

Use of superstar, freakishly successful titles as comps for much quieter titles that happen to be on the same subject is to be discouraged.  Malcolm Gladwell has been so over-used as a comp that I hesitate to bring him up even when we actually do have a title that resonates with his.   Our Professor Anonymous may have the better book but we don’t have the Gladwell Inc publicity machine.

Sometimes good comps can be plotted geometrically.  The Harvard series of Annotated Jane Austen’s continues this season with Northanger Abbey.  One comp axis contains the other active editions of Northanger Abbey so the store can gauge customer interest in that title; the other axis contains the six previous Harvard Annotateds of her other titles, the format of which is identical so should have a similar sales pattern. 

Sometimes a great book really is incomparable, such as the forthcoming Why Architects Still Draw by Italian architect/poet Paolo Belardi.  In this case the most useful comps remind booksellers of how well MIT Press does in this genre.

Extraordinarily prolific authors can present their own issues.  Terry Eagleton has a very long list of successful titles, so the trick is to find the comp among them that is closest to his new book.  Note that this sometimes means resisting the impulse to just list the best-selling prior book!

My favorite comps are unexpected, and come at the book from off-stage rather than full-on.  I like comps that help us to think about a book and imagine its reader more than comps that promise some slavish repeat of a sales pattern. 

One of my favorite new spring books is Poilu, the World War I diaries of a French soldier.  It’s utterly unique but the universe of potential First World War comps is massive.  So my colleagues and I came up with various literary references- Paul Fussell, Vera Brittain, e.e. cummings- that have little to do with replicating a sales pattern but, together, really help to bring the book into focus.

Literary references can crop up in unusual places.  In Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture, the author argues that the best writing about buildings is found in novels- specifically, Elizabeth Bowen and Alan Hollinghurst.  I love mentioning Eva Trout and The Stranger’s Child as comps even though on a purely metric level they don’t qualify. 

Talking of novelists, the apt literary comp is especially useful for relatively unknown writers.  For the fantastic but obscure-by-design Margellos World Republic of Letters series, which introduces works in translation to English audiences, having a few good comps is essential: Rodrigo Rey Rosa will be of interest to Roberto Bolano and Paul Bowles readers, and Can Xue evokes Kafka, Borges and Bruno Schulz.

One of our collective rep favorites this season, Alon Confino’s A World Without Jews, faces the challenge of a massive pool of potential comp titles on World War II and the Holocaust.  We narrowed the list to a few essential historical texts like Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners and Hitler’s Furies, along with Confino’s earlier works.  But I loved it when my colleague Patricia added Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, and when my other colleague Adena finished Avi Shavit’s profound new book about Israel, My Promised Land, and rightly suggested it belongs on the list.  The horror Confino describes makes Shavit’s young Israel seem inevitable.

I suppose the most extreme form of book comparison these days is found at ground zero for extreme everything - Amazon.  Here you can easily generate price lists of the identical book offered by re-sellers at a bewildering variety of prices.  In an odd way, it undercuts the idea that comps predict sales or value, though "value" in A-world is a meaningless concept..

So back to the house.  I’m hoping that we find a buyer who approaches comps on our home the way smart booksellers approach comps on our books- as information, good to know, but in no way replacing the unique object, which stands alone on its merits.

yes, another 2013 best-of list: my harvard/mit/yale picks

This year Harvard, MIT and Yale University Press published 1,028 new titles, give or take.  Every one of them was worthy, and with luck (and with our ace rep presentations)  each found an audience beyond the author’s mother.

At this time of the year I remember that what drew me to these three presses in the first place is that I love their books.  As a bookseller they were my favorite books to order and sell, and as a book fiend I bought more of them than I could afford or could actually read.

And I still love the books we publish, but some more than others.  So I’ve culled a list of ten favorites  from the titles I sold this year.  These are not necessarily the big name, market-driven, high expectation titles from the lists.  And there are plenty more that I could endorse with pleasure.  But these are simply my top ten, in no particular order- the titles I’d most love to receive, feel most compelled to share, and would most heartily recommend. 

And needless to say, if you're moved to check them out, do so at your favorite bookstore!

Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha

Edited and compiled by Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton, and Hermann Zschiegner

MIT Press January $39.95

Tricky title but bear with me.  Inspired by Jack Kerouac in the 1960s and 70s, artist Ed Ruscha created a series of small conceptual photography books documenting mundane subjects: Twenty-six Gas Stations, Various Small Fires, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, and many more.  In so doing he all but invented the photographic taxonomy genre, one of my favorite MIT Press strengths.  I still remember swooning every time a new Bernd & Hilla Becher album of rusting industrial hulks landed in the bookstore.  And everyone got sick of me extolling the Melnicks’ Manhole Covers, still one of the great photo taxonomies of all time.  This sweet, funny, colorful book, in which other artists spoof and build on Ruscha’s work (Thirty-four Parking Lots Forty Years Later, None of the Buildings on Sunset Strip, and Various Unbaked Cookies, among others) is also a gorgeous piece of book-making and graphic design.  I was thrilled to see it make Dwight Garner’s New York Times holiday list- though oddly, in the best bathroom reading category!

Wunderkammer

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien

Yale November $29.95

Another kind of homage, this time to the wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities.  Think Joseph Cornell’s vitrines, or those old-school museum dioramas we'd be marched past in sixth grade, or really anyone’s treasured display case of a cherished obsession.  The trick here is that these are also deliberate works of art, constructed by a who’s who of international architecture and design stars.  Curators for the 2012 Venice Biennale Architecture exhibition asked participants to share the contents of their lives rather than to create some object, and 35 of them filled empty boxes with meaningful collections.  The results are surprising, funny and sometimes puzzling.  The book documents the exhibition, artist by artist, with lavish illustrations and explanatory text.  It looks a bit like the two other recent charmers that were editorially midwifed by Michelle Komie at the YUP Art Workshop, Unpacking My Library: Architects & Their Books and Unpacking My Library: Writers & Their Books.

Baghdad: The City in Verse

Translated and edited by Reuven Snir

Harvard November $29.95

I’m a sucker for city books, and I have a big collection of urban histories, walking tours, photographs and urbanist manifestos.  City poetry?  Not so much.  Milwaukee, where I live, is not the kind of place to which poets dedicate poems, though in our defense we are less than 200 years old.  (And we do have at least one fine poet, John Koethe, who has written lovingly about the city)  But some cities just inspire poetic devotion.  Had I the talent I’d wax poetic over Montreal, New York, Berlin- places I stalk like a jealous lover.  Last year Harvard published a fascinating new way to access a city, Mark Ford’s London: A History in Verse.  This season, I’ve been moved and surprised by this collection of Arabic poems about Baghdad.  Among the many sad consequences of the war is the material destruction of the city and its residents.  But it's also polluted the imagery that comes to mind when a North American hears the word Baghdad.  This heartfelt and sometimes heartbreaking anthology of love/hate letters in verse, spanning 1200 years, is a fresh new vector into a place worth knowing more about.  A sample:

[I Am Your Ransom}

Oh friends of mine in Baghdad are you

Still faithful or has our friendship worn out?

On the day of farewell, did your eyes shed tears

For me?  Mine still weeping, morning and evening.

When you talk of distant friends,

Do you speak well of me?

Oh Baghdad, I wish all cities to be your ransom,

Even my path, even my abode.

I have wandered through lands, East and West;

I led my horses there, the camels as well.

Never have I seen such a homeland as Baghdad;

Never have I seen a river such as the Tigris;

Nor such residents- tender qualities,

Sweet speeches, good thoughts, and ideas

People challenge me: If your love for Baghdad was

Genuine, why did you leave?  I give them my answer:

The rich remain in their land,

While the poor are tossed away by fate.

-Abu Sa’d Muhammad ibn’Ali ibn

Khalaf al-Nayramani (?-1023)

China’s Vanishing Worlds

Matthias Messmer and Hsin-Mei Chuang

MIT September $60

One of the most massive relocations in history  is underway in China, a transformation only barely on North American radar.  In the next twenty years, 280 million rural peasants will be installed in booming Chinese cities in an effort to modernize and raise living standards.  This stunning book of color photographs, a seven year labor of love by a Swiss-Chinese couple, may serve as a final visual document of this monumental dislocation: China as it once was, and as it will soon no longer be.  Just about every image is mesmerizing, and it’s impossible not to visually scour every corner of the kitchens and living rooms of these ordinary farm families.  The explanatory text is smart, personal, sometimes surprising.  This book really fits with a longstanding strength of MIT Press, driven by its visionary executive editor, Roger Conover.  He’s interested in chronicling lost worlds, from derelict grain elevators to defunct mental institutions.  Isn’t documenting the disintegration and destruction of human and built landscapes one of the main jobs of contemporary writers and artists? Should be.

The Danube: A Journey from the Black Sea tothe Black Forest

Nick Thorpe

Yale November $35

Perhaps it’s because I’ve just finished reading Artemis Cooper’s spectacular biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who lived every boy’s fantasy- well this one’s anyway- by tramping along the Danube across Europe as a teenager in the 30s, writing each day up in his Moleskine; or perhaps it’s because I’ve had a cabin on the Mississippi River for the past few years and have become a bit obsessed with river magic.  Whatever the reason, I was primed to love Nick Thorpe’s charming travelogue/history about his journey up the Danube.  (This counter-intuitive east to west direction was my big selling point for the book, as most people who have written about the Danube have traveled the reverse direction.  Booksellers didn’t seem sufficiently impressed with this detail.)  Armchair travel has something of a bad rap sometimes, but this is as good as it gets- literary and stylish in the vein of Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, packed with extraordinary “characters,” and full of enough interesting history that it will have you planning a trip to Eastern Europe next summer, or at least dreaming of one.  

The Lost Art of Finding Our Way

John Edward Huth

Harvard May $35

Did you know that the most natural human speed of travel is 3 miles per hour?  That would encompass walking, rowing, maybe sailing.  This factoid and hundreds of others make John Huth’s elegy to our short-circuited wayfinding system so compelling.  Now that I think of it, this is another homage to a lost world- in this case, the ancient art of navigation, which humans were once equipped to do by reading clouds, shadows, currents, and the natural world around us.  In the age of Mapquest, GPS and device addiction, this key instinctive cognitive ability has atrophied.  But Huth- one of those passionate physicists who can also write- has a plan for us to get some of it back.  His title, it turns out, isn’t just a wistful metaphor but signals a kind of practical how-to manual.  In a funny way, the path back to finding our way involves losing ourselves.  I really love this kind of science book, and he’s a fascinating guy.  Here’s a little clip that shows you why.

Garry Winogrand

Edited by Leo Rubinfien

Yale April $85

Street photography has had something of a renaissance lately- if you haven’t checked out the amazing, recently unearthed work of Vivian Maier, get thee to a bookstore!  But the daddy of all mid-20th century street photography was surely Garry Winogrand.  He did some of his best-known work in Manhattan in the 60s, iconic images of people in odd but ordinary situations.  He roamed the US and much of his work remains undeveloped on thousands of rolls of film.  This incredibly lucious doorstop, the catalog for an exhibition that’s working its way around the world, is a black and white urban photography buff’s dream.  My only complaint is that every time I pick it up I know I’ve just lost another hour.

Returning to Reims

Didier Eribon

MIT/semiotext(e) August $17.95

This little memoir speaks to me on so many levels.  Didier Eribon is a smart, highly-regarded Parisian intellectual who came out of one closet- disclosing that he’s gay- only to find he remained stuck in another closet- the confines of his working class roots.  Politically progressive yet from the French version of a “what’s the matter with Kansas” family, (workers who gravitated from supporting the French Communist Party to voting National Front), Eribon uses his personal family history as a way of explaining where the Left more generally has gone wrong, and lost its natural base.  Along the way he cleverly explores how the class closet and the political closet function just as insidiously as the sexual one.  (And boy oh boy when they overlap!)  Of course, there are contemporary North American resonances too numerous to mention.  Is this another sort of  “documenting lost worlds” project?  I think so.

Lillian Hellman: An Audacious Life

Dorothy Gallagher

Yale January (available Dec 15) $25

This sympathetic but iconoclastic biography of the great American dramatist is long overdue.  I remember from my first bookshop job in the long-ago seventies that Hellman’s memoir trilogy was a literary sensation, and one of the first hardcover books I ever bought.  She was revered for her courageous plays, such as The Children’s Hour, but also for her brave confrontation with red-hunters and McCarthyites.  In the past few decades her reputation has been dragged through the mud, and this is a partial resurrection.  One of the interesting strands of Hellman’s life was her Jewish and Southern background, and this volume- part of the wonderful Jewish Lives series, short, smart, attractive books that consistently find perfect subject-author pairings- gets at that dynamic beautifully.  Literary journalist Dorothy Gallagher writes like a dream, and she herself is a red-diaper baby, about which she wrote a fantastic memoir, How I Came Into my Inheritance.  

The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman

Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert

Harvard November $39.95

This revelation is the fruit of a long, complicated project with elaborate back-story, strong sales and reviews for the French edition, and some explosive controversy in the anthropological community, which has studied the Yanomami for decades.  If you want to learn more about all of that- and you will, after reading Davi Kopenawa’s first-person account, which makes up the bulk of the book- you can do so in the helpful front and back matter.  But I would plunge right in to the first-person section.  Essentially, this is a book about “the ways of white people” by a shaman and spokesman for an endangered people, a man who has traveled the world as a sort of ambassador and has strong opinions on western industrial society and what it has wrought for the Brazilian rainforest and his people.  Composed mainly as a coming of age story, he incorporates philosophy, politics, and history in his memoir.  He turns the tables on the European anthropologists studying the Yanomami, calling them the "people of merchandise,"and anthropologizes them.  (“Their cities are full of big houses filled with piles of innumerable goods, but their elders never give them to anyone.”)  Documentation of a lost world?  No kidding.  A big, scholarly, 30 year project, the life's work of a dedicated scientist, ushered along by superb editorial teams working on three continents:  exhibit A for why we need vibrant university presses.