In 1970, a New York publishing company put out a debut novel by an editor and former teacher from Ohio. The press, then known as Holt, Rinehart and Winston, had taken a chance on the book, which had been rejected by numerous other houses. The initial print run was somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 units—modest expectations that looked justified when, in the first year, sales barely cleared 2,000. This despite getting positive reviews in the New York Times and The New Yorker and being assigned to freshman classes at the City College of New York. The attention wasn’t enough. Four years later, the novel was out of print.
The author stayed in the game, albeit precariously. While working on her second book, she was a single parent commuting to Manhattan for a job in publishing. At the time, she was “so strapped for money that the condition moved from debilitating stress to hilarity.” Despite her first book’s lacklustre sales, she found a publisher for her second. The debut had attracted the admiration of a high-profile editor, one who happened to work in the same building she did. He acquired her next title, and the next, keeping her in house as she steadily built acclaim and an audience.
Eventually, the writer scored an opportunity still regarded as a grail of book marketing: her debut was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. Sales reportedly soared to 800,000 copies. Today, publishers hope that their titles will nab the book club stamp—and the ensuing bump in sales—straight out of the gate. But, in this case, the Oprah endorsement came only at the turn of the millennium, thirty years after the novel was first released. By then, the author had published some half dozen other books and cleared the stable of major literary accolades. She had won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, the Nobel. The author was Toni Morrison. The novel was The Bluest Eye.
The careers of many literary titans of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries bear similar hallmarks: The disappointing debut. The stalwart editorial advocate. The understanding that, in order for a writer to truly break out, time is a meaningful factor. For every author whose first try strikes gold—like Philip Roth, whose debut won him the National Book Award at twenty-seven—there’s one like Morrison—or Cormac McCarthy, or Jack Kerouac, or 2025’s Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction writer Percival Everett—on whom a publisher had to take a second, or third, or fourth, or fifth chance. In 1993, reflecting on The Bluest Eye’s reception, Morrison noted its initial life had echoed that of its young Black protagonist, Pecola Breedlove: “dismissed, trivialized, [and] misread.” Nevertheless, the novel is now an essential part of a legacy that reshaped literature.
Nowadays, it might not get that opportunity. It’s true most debuts are not, aesthetically, The Bluest Eye. But nor are they as easily granted second chances after commercial disappointment. Instead, there is tremendous pressure to succeed from the beginning. If they fail, all bets are off, sometimes literally. Countless factors contribute to how well a book sells, and there are many points in that chain at which things can break down. If they do, much of the responsibility converges on the writer. That a publisher bet on them and lost means it will be harder to secure the next deal. No matter the reasons for the flop—a tiny marketing budget, staff turnover at the press, cutbacks in culture coverage, backlash toward a hot literary trend—the writer carries the failure on their record.
Sales track—or simply track, in industry parlance—is an invisible force shaping contemporary literature. Much depends on that number. On the basis of track, published authors struggle to keep going; those just starting out fear their careers will be severed at the root. Track shapes how an agent pitches a book and how editors assess whether to buy it. Track restricts reader choice by dictating which books are served up as the next big thing (and the next, and the next) and by kneecapping writers deemed insufficiently commercial. The primacy of track, in other words, is a barometer for the health of literary culture. Right now, when the industry is especially skittish, the obsession with finding the next blockbuster hit privileges the survival of the few at the expense of the many.
Track is like credit: it might be better to have none at all. When a writer has a book that’s ready to sell, their agent takes the manuscript or proposal out on submission by pitching it to editors. If an editor is interested, they will in turn pitch the project to their company for approval. One of the things that publishing teams look at, when evaluating a book for potential acquisition, is a writer’s past sales. Using tools like BookScan, the industry’s pricey software for tracking units sold, publishers gauge how a previous title fared and whether the author warrants further investment. (BookNet, the equivalent in Canada, is a nonprofit. The data provided by both is incomplete.)
Being trailed by one’s sales data gives first-time writers a certain advantage. Debuts are deeply attractive to publishers because, as writer and researcher Laura McGrath puts it, “there is nothing but potential. If your track is zero, there’s only one place for it to go.” The book’s advance is therefore set by anticipation—the publisher’s bid is roughly commensurate with how big they think they can break it out. They reach this number by assigning a value to what McGrath, who studies publishing analytics, calls “soft data”—a bouquet of assumptions about readership, authorship, markets, and genre. Those assumptions are then “turned into something that seems like it should have been arrived upon in a rigorous fashion,” she says, “but it’s not.” If enough bidders get ensorcelled by a project—or by the bloodlust of an auction—the price can be driven up into six or seven figures. The book business may be centred in New York, but the logic is pure Las Vegas.
“These books that have huge price tags are given impossible expectations to meet.”
If buying the debut is a rollicking night at the craps table, then the sophomore project is the sober morning after. Gone is the clean slate. What publishers really want to see, McGrath says, is growth. “More than any particular number, they’re looking to see a track that is always on the rise.” This is impossible to prove after only one book, especially a book that loses the publisher money. Which is to say: almost all of them. “Most books don’t sell well,” says Alia Hanna Habib, literary agent and author of the forthcoming Take It from Me, a career guide for non-fiction writers. (She counts McGrath among her clients.)
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