We haven’t had all that much contact with our British publishers, Penguin U.K. But they seem startlingly proactive. First there was the billboard campaign in the London tube. Now there’s an online Freakonomics quiz. It’s true that the quiz plays pretty fast and loose with the material in our book but it would be churlish (for us at least) to . . .
As surprised as we have been by the success of Freakonomics in the U.S., we are doubly surprised by its success in the U.K., where it has been at or near the top of the non-fiction charts. (Last I saw, the only other American book on the charts was Daniel Coyle’s Lance Armstrong’s War — retitled in the U.K. as . . .
Levitt and I don’t have all that many disagreements, at least not in public. But this one’s a little close to home. It began with this post, in which I wondered aloud if the tour was worth the publisher’s money. Steve followed recently with this post, which detailed why, from his perspective, the tour was a waste of his time. . . .
The answer is, that just like real estate agents and their clients, our incentives as authors are not perfectly aligned with the incentives of our publisher, William Morrow. As a consequence, we take actions that benefit ourselves and screw the publisher, just like real estate agents screw their clients. Every extra copy of Freakonomics that is sold earns the publishers . . .
Here’s what I wrote a few weeks ago, just as we embarked on a short California book tour: Earlier in this space we asked if book ads work; now we are led to the next obvious question: how about the author’s tour? Can it possibly be worth all the money and time it takes to fly two people across the . . .
The last stop on our recent California tour was at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Ca. This appearance had come about kind of casually, so we hadn’t thought about it much beforehand. The Google folks asked us to blog about our impressions, to be posted on the Google blog, and we did. Here’s what we had to say. To: All . . .
Last week, we went to California. Our publisher, William Morrow/HarperCollins, had determined that Freakonomics wasn’t selling as well there as elsewhere. It may have been a simple case of late adoption — Levitt and I are based in Chicago and New York, respectively, two cities where the book started strong — but Harper was taking no chances. (For the record, . . .
I can understand why little-known authors and their friends post reviews of their own books at amazon. Judy Chevalier has a paper that finds that good online reviews sell a surprising number of books. (A bad review suppresses sales even more than a good review boosts sales, which also makes sense.) More puzzling to me is why everyday people post . . .
We thought we had somehow gotten away without doing a book tour for Freakonomics. (As most writers can tell you, the typical book tour inevitably lands you in Milwaukee on a Tuesday night, reading to four people, three of whom are your relatives.) But our vigilant publisher, William Morrow/HarperCollins, decided that Freakonomics has not yet bloomed in California as fully . . .
Book publishing is rife with conventional wisdoms that are vigorously doubted but seldom overturned. That’s partly because book data is treated like some kind of family secret. This is changing a little bit with the recent advent of Bookscan, a subscriber service that provides industry-wide sales figures; in the past, publishers and bookstores and distributors did not feel compelled to . . .
[for a Freakonomics status report, click here] Our publisher has been busily promoting and selling Freakonomics, which of course is its job, and which we, not surprisingly, applaud. When something good happens — a nice review in the Wall Street Journal, for instance, or an upcoming appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart — the publisher assiduously spreads the . . .
A few bloggers have pointed out that the cover of Freakonomics is, shall we say, quite similar to the cover of this book. To which we initially said: Yikes. Should we be embarrassed about this? We thought the cover of Freakonomics was brilliant the moment the publisher showed it to us. We had been suggesting something along similar lines — . . .
Well, Freakonomics is finally on sale. It should be in most bookstores today, and is ready to ship from Amazon.com, bn.com, etc. The good news is that the book is already in a fourth printing. The bad news is … well, there is no bad news, not yet at least. Early reviews are excellent. On Slate, the 2nd portion of . . .