Sales
What are sales for?
Sales are what we crave.
They seem to torment us
Time and time over.
They are to be driven by:
How can we live without sales?
Ah, solving that question
Leaves the Board of Directors
More desperate each month
Addressing the stocks.
It seems to me that every day our minds and bodies are further bound to the routine of daily sales checks. It’s becoming positively obsessive, logging in collating units sold, returns and spoils. For months, one nameless director (yes, her) banned me from checking at 5.00 a.m., especially when one had already checked at 11.00 p.m., 2.30 p.m. (with a lightish lunch and Excel to hand on the laptop) and 4.00 p.m. (“Just to be sure we haven’t stocked out, Dear.”) It was beginning to be take over. But that’s what sales do, they take over. Your mood is as variable as the monthly budget and, of course, its deficit.
Now, all this talk of literature doesn’t mean much when your belly’s rumbling and the tax bill means you’ll default on the mortgage. Well, anyone in business will recognise this mood, the desperation for cash, the clarification of what the game is really all about, I imagine most call it “reality” and it bites. Maybe everyone starts off thinking sales are somehow an adjunct to the process of running a successful business. Lots of small presses I know think sales are rather vulgar, and sometimes simply unattainable for anything of quality. What kind of thinking is that? But if you’re serious about publishing, pretty soon you’ll be stopping people in the street trying to sell them your wares. It’s not long before you’re eyeing up the milkman as a candidate for that latest tricky volume: “Oh, you noticed that did you? This would make a super Christmas present, actually. Do you come from a large family, Ed?”
So why is it one feels vaguely guilty when passing on the news from Brass Tacks Boulevard, letting someone know that their work will never sell, or worse still, simply hasn’t, and one is left fumbling for some fluffly lie that literature stands above all this kind of nonsense. Truth is, literature is a product of an economy, and to imagine that a book can be the former without the latter is in fact a vanity. The worst kind, the kind where editors pretend that value lies outside of demand as if it were a thing of the spirit, ethereal and other wordly (or perhaps best left to history). Literature without sales is like religion without believers. It’s an oxymoron. Literature is our daily bread.
