“surprise bestseller”

Since I tend to avoid bestselling books for as long as possible, it was only yesterday morning on the buss that I began reading the 2001 hit Wittgenstein’s Poker, which many of you have probably already read. It’s an interesting piece of reading.

For those who don’t know, it’s a book about a heated 1946 discussion at the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. Bertrand Russell was also in attendance. Popper’s version of the story (that Wittgenstein threatened him with a red-hot poker) is backed up by only one other living eyewitness, and among all the eyewitnesses there is a remarkable variety of memories about what transpired. But the poker incident really just serves as a pretext for a biographical history of the philosophy of that period.

In any case, it surprised me slightly to read that:

(a) Russell’s history of philosophy book was a surprise bestseller

(b) it freed him from financial worries

(c) the sales totalled 40,000 copies

Point (a) was surprising because I had assumed that most of Russell’s book during that period were bestsellers. Point (b) was surprising because I never imagined that Russell, coming from that family, would have had financial worries in the first place. Point (c) was surprising because I wouldn’t imagine that 40,000 sales would be enough to warrant a strong statement like “freed him from financial worries.”

Those are healthy sales, don’t get me wrong. If you’ve never written an academic book before, you have no idea how unprofitable it is: a frivolous supplement to an academic salary. In fact, if you’re looking at such books in financial terms, their main reward would be precisely through indirect salary increases by raising the chances of tenure, promotion, additional grant funding, and the like. But except maybe at a couple of crucial career junctures, no one ever writes academic books to earn direct or indirect money in that way. (Textbooks would be an exception, and some popular books as well. You can actually get quite rich off textbooks if you write one that thrives.)

Anyway, I once calculated that I would earn around $5 personally for every sale of Tool-Being. Russell’s history of philosophy was around 3 times that length, but might not be 3 times the price in today’s dollars. If he earned the equivalent of $5 per copy in today’s terms, then 40,000 copies would mean $200,000. That’s very good for a philosophy book, obviously, but I can’t imagine “freed him from financial worries” could be said of a man of Russell’s social stratum if $200,000 were the amount in question.

A colleague of mine did have a professor who happened to write on a fashionable Eastern Philosophy topic in the mid-1970’s, and he did become a millionaire from that book.

The typical philosophy book that doesn’t stir up an unusual amount of interest will sell mostly to libraries, and there are fewer such library sales than you might think: generally between 200-300 worldwide.

Another factoid, relayed to me by a veteran publisher: most books have half of their lifetime sales in the first year after publication.