The Literary Value of Ass-Fucking

I cannot say that I don't take some form of satisfaction in this, maybe that's mean, but I don't care:

Maybe it's called Dog Days for a reason? Slow, lethargic, etc. Our cousin over at Galleycat has discovered from Bookscan that Wonkette Ana Marie Cox's debut novel isn't exactly flying off the shelves--especially if one considers all of the earned media she got from two reviews in the New York Times, a full page in People, etc.

Galleycat Ron: "So far, with numbers rounded up and all that, Cox has sold a grand total of 3,800 copies of Dog Days and the momentum already seems to be dissipating; last week saw a 37.5% drop in sales from the week before (1,000 down from 1,600). Furthermore, the book's audience is quite narrowly focused, as over a third of Cox's total sales come from New York and D.C."

The American Enterprise Institute noted the other day that Dog Days on Amazon.com was doing only slightly better than Quantitative Chemical Analysis, Sixth Edition. That was then. Now that 2002 textbook is doing a full thousand places better than the D.C. chick lit novel. Today Cox's a few spots behind "Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference."

I'm sure, if and when I finally get my book together, it will sell a fraction of 3,800. However, it will not have the publicity of Dog Days behind it to say the least - it will sell poorly because, well, it simply sucks (marketing has always been my strongpoint). There are many writers on the internet of a higher quality than the well-financed publicity hound that is Ana Marie Cox. Look on the blogroll to the right and you'll find them. The only bad thing is that I hope publishers are not scared off buying books by bloggers. The fact is, it's pretty obvious, people didn't read Wonkette because she was a gifted writer, they read it because it was a two paragraph frivolity.