Famous by Association!

I’m married to a published author! CAG’s first book is finally out, in the bookstores and on Amazon.com! Last weekend, while I was presenting at a conference, he stopped by our neighborhood bookstore, and there it was both in the “new releases” and in the regular sociology section. We went back the next day – I wanted to see it for myself. My imagination ran wild and I was picturing dozens of copies laid out on the most prominent displays and selling like hotcakes. Of course, it wasn’t quite the case. The store only carried four copies, although it seemed to have sold at least one already. In the regular sociology section, the two copies were quite appropriately (albeit merely by alphabetical chance) placed between Erving Goffman, the father of the symbolic interaction school, and John Goldthorpe, the British scholar of class and inequality. I was a lot less happy with the book’s placement in the new releases section – it was hard to see on a lower shelf and was dwarfed by something a lot taller but with a lot less tasteful and interesting cover – so I placed one of the copies on a display table, right next to the most recent book by French sociologist Luc Boltanski. But my marketing effort was in vain: on a subsequent visit to the store a few days later, the book was back on the shelf.

Since that weekend, CAG and I have been quite obsessed with the book’s sales ranking on Amazon. It experienced a meteoric but short-lived success: overnight the ranking shot from below 1,000,000 to mid-80,000; it was in the top 10 of new releases in non-fiction/social sciences/poverty category. As of today, the book’s ranking is in 500,000, but it is a respectable number 20 in Poverty category and 44 in Civil Rights and Liberties.

It will probably be a while, if ever, till his book becomes a New York Times bestseller or be chosen by Oprah for her Book Club, but it is sure to win a couple of professional awards, and the publisher is already thinking about a second print run. We’ll have a book party, but not until CAG is back from the Promised Land in August, so y’all have plenty of time to get your own copies for the esteemed author to autograph!