My Mom’s Eyesight and Best-sellers

Life threw me a curve ball a few days ago when my mother stepped into my office and said she could no longer read the dial on her over-sized watch.

I immediately suspected the worst.

About twenty years ago, my mom went in for what was supposed to be the routine removal of a cataract from her left eye. Instead, an incompetent doctor in Rapid City, South Dakota, damaged her optical nerve and blinded that eye.

My mother, being who she is, simply went on with her life.

As she aged, her good eye developed macular degeneration that eventually limited her eyesight, as she puts it, to seeing “quilts” without much detail.

The fact that she could no longer read the large dial on her watch alarmed all of us so I made an emergency appointment for the next morning.

That night was difficult for my mom, my dad, and the rest of us as we contemplated what life would be like if she became totally blind. Although she will turn 91 years-old the day after Easter, my mother still cleans her houses, does laundry, and cooks for my father – and she will absolutely not squander money on a maid or go out to eat meals in a restaurant.

She is, after all, from the depression generation.

After a series of tests the next morning, the eye doctor told my mom that he’d found fluid in her eye and wasn’t certain where it came from – but he was absolutely certain that it could be safely removed. He promised that she would not end up being blind.We will return in ten days for a decision about how to get out that fluid.

The scare was another reminder of the uncertainty and fragile nature of our lives.

It was also a reminder that all of us should, as my wife, Patti, likes to quote: “Eat Dessert First.”

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Authors and publishers are notorious when it comes to exaggerating how many books they sell.

But with the widespread use of bar codes and computer tracking programs, getting an accurate count of book sales is now easy.

About 172,000 books were published in 2009 in the United States, which is a healthy number. But how many of them sold in significant numbers?

Not as many as you might think, according to Publishers Weekly, the industry’s bible.

According to PW, there were only 130 novels (fiction) and 91 nonfiction books that sold more than 100,000 hardbacks in 2009.

That’s all. 

The 100,000 figure is considered a milestone in book publishing because that number is what it takes to generate a million dollars for a publisher.

The last time that I asked an editor, I was told the average nonfiction book sells from 8,000 to 10,000 hardback copies. That’s right, 8 to 10 thousand.

Remember, we are only talking about hardbacks, not electronic books or paperbacks. But let’s think about those hardback figures.

If 8,000 is average, well, let’s compare it to, say, one of the lowest ranked tv programs last week: Larry King Live , which had a measely 358,000 viewers.

(Okay, you get the idea. 8,000 is not much to brag about in a country with a population of 305 million!)

So what books sold the most in 2009?

Let’s check fiction first.

The top-seller was Dan Brown’s book, The Lost Symbol, which was his long-awaited follow-up to the world-wide, mega-seller, the Da Vinci Code. Brown’s book clocked in with sales of 5.5 million hardback copies! Do the math. If 100,000 copies equals $1 million for a publisher and Brown sold 5.5 million – well, I can assure you that he gets treated special whenever he decides to visit his editors in New York.

The next big fiction seller was John Grisham, who has been riding the best seller lists for years. The Associate: A Novel sold an estimated 1.3 million – quite a bit less than Brown’s sales, but still enough to be ranked number two.

The next big sellers ranked in order were written by P.C. Cast, Kathryn Stockett, James Patterson, Grisham again with Ford Country,and Janet Evanovich. Stephenie Meyer of teenage vampire love fame sold 912, 219 copies of The Host.

The rest of the close-to-a-million in sales were written by other familiar names: Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Patricia Cornwell, and Sue Grafton — which underscores what publishers’ know — people buy fiction for the author. They buy nonfiction because of the subject matter.

So let’s look at the nonfiction side.

Number one on the nonfiction  list, selling an impressive 2.6 million copies was Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue: An American Life. (And if you believe she wrote that by herself, I have a bridge to sell you.)

Next was ACT LIKE A LADY. THINK LIKE A MAN: What men really think about love, relationships, intimacy and commitment, by Steve Harvey, which sold 1.7 million.

Glenn Beck came in third with Aruging with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government, which sold an estimated one million copies.

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto by Mark R. Levin sold another million, and number five on the list was True Compass: A Memoir by Edward Kennedy which sold 870,402 copies.

Yep, Sarah Palin outsold Ted Kennedy.

Earlier this year, my long-time editor at G. P. Putnam and Sons publishing told me that if I wanted to write a new book, I should forget about my favorite subjects – mental health, spies, and true crime – and write a partisan political attack (preferably with a right-wing, tea-party point of view) or the memoir of a famous person.

Obviously, he had been reading the same sales reports as PW.