Djelloul Marbrook

The writer Andrew Sullivan recently crowed about the failure of
Mary Cheney’s Now It’s My Turn to sell more than 4,091 copies since the start of the year. The vice president’s daughter (seen left) hasn’t endeared herself to evangelicals by denigrating their jihad to make gay marriage unconstitutional. What’s so pathetic about this is that it so perfectly comments on a society that reduces creative effort to a horse race.

Sullivan was able to use Nielsen’s Book Scan to rub Ms. Cheney’s face in her sales figures, as if sales figures tell us anything about a book’s merits or demerits. He figured that since she reportedly got a $1 million advance she ought to be red-faced about her modest sales. He ought to be red-faced about his meanness.

Book Scan has been around since 2001. It captures about 70 percent of sales for a hardcover book. It’s used by agents, editors and marketers, and it’s pricey. When it’s used by journalists to humiliate writers it becomes an instrument of persecution, and journalists who use it this way are pigs.

You could argue that since Mary Cheney is her father’s most trusted political aide Sullivan had every right as a journalist to use Book Scan this way. After all, she wasn’t trying to write the great American novel. I don’t mind this argument. But whichever way you argue, the incident points up the squalor of a society that measures creativity by sales.

How many times have you seen a critic ask if a writer can top his current book? The idea is so ridiculous it hardly bears discussion, but that doesn’t stop many critics.

I haven’t read Ms. Cheney’s book, and I don’t intend to. I don’t like her politics or her father’s, although I agree with her that gay marriage is hardly a constitutional crisis, except for people who think people who think for themselves are enemies of the state. But to take any measure of glee in her book’s modest sales strikes me as every bit as mean as her father’s politics.

When we measure everything by its earning power we demean everything and everyone. That’s why I’ve argued for a long time that best-seller lists belong on business pages, but they’ll never be posted there because the media persist in trying to befuddle us into believing such lists are a measure of a book’s merits rather than the amount of marketing clout put into it.