29 June 2020
Book publishing is unlike many industries in that its fundamental product, the writing, is not, for the most part, an in-house commodity. Publishers wait for their next new bestselling authors to arrive on no known date, writing about no pre-arranged topic, and in many if not most cases as people previously unknown. A Nielsen- or NPD-style point-of-sales tracking system of each authors' progress is impractical. The rankings of book sales on retail platforms like Amazon can offer only clues to how titles are navigating a bottomless marketplace of millions of books.
