Well, of course nobody really knows. Beyond, that is, the obvious and boring answer — by having lots of people buy it.
Crusoe’s Books has a go at answering the question in a post entitled Sleepers. They use as a case in point John Williams’ Stoner. This book is a bit of a slow-burn phenomenon though it has never broken into truly astronomical bestsellerdom. “Published by Viking Press in 1965, Stoner sold somewhere in the region of two thousand copies before quietly slipping out of print.” Then forty years later, in 2006, New York Review Books published an edition. (It had been quietly reissued once or twice in the intervening years.) In a 2007 review of that edition in The New York Times Book Review, Morris Dickstein [not John McGahern as Crusoe’s has it] referred to it as “a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away”.
Reviews generally don’t sell huge numbers of books — unless, that is, they do. And this review certainly got the ball rolling. One of the frustrating things about book marketing is that any rules there may be have exceptions, and the exceptions are often more potent than the rules!
Crusoes assures us “However much critics may disagree over a book’s artistic merits, its commercial success depends to an extraordinary degree upon the institutions that legitimise it. Reviews, prizes, influential advocates, university syllabuses, booksellers, literary festivals and changing cultural fashions all contribute to what eventually comes to seem like an entirely natural success.” Of Stoner they claim “Success followed not because the text itself altered, but because the conditions of its reception had”. This doesn’t seem to me to be saying anything much. It’s not like Stoner suddenly started winning prizes, being featured at festivals, getting reviewed everywhere, and I’d be surprised if it was to be found on any university syllabuses in 2006-7. In so far as it began to be talked about by booksellers that would be because — well — the book was being talked about. Once a few people had responded to the “perfect novel” message, others followed. You can’t bring this sort of thing about: it happens by chance — and that’s what makes a bestseller.
I can’t help thinking that the NYRB cover design helped. It’s a detail from Thomas Eakins’ 1900 portrait of Louis N. Kenton (1865–1947), Eakins’ brother-in-law.* The picture, shown below, is named “The Thinker”, a title which The New York Metropolitan Museum’s website tells us was added a few years later by Susan, Eakins’ wife, after her sister’s marriage to Mr Kenton had broken down.
The original life-size painting measures 82″ x 42″, (208.3 x 106.7 cm).
Crusoe’s reaches for intellectual support from Pierre Bourdieu who apparently told us that cultural prestige is garnered by restricted distribution. Maybe OK if we’re talking about a Picasso painting — but when did you last notice a book shooting to the top of the bestseller list because nobody could find a copy? Publishers have NOT learned from Bourdieu that they can make money off old forgotten books because of this mechanism: they’ve learned they can make money off old books because of the revolution in printing technology has enabled them to print small quantities, even ones and twos, on-odrer.
For a fifty-year old book to now be selling more copies each year than it did in the prior year is, to say the least, remarkable. By the early 2020s it was ticking over at an impressive 10,000+ a year. Last year it got to more than 50,000; this year’s going to be many more. Fifty, even a hundred thousand copies in a year of a bright spanking new novel is an impressive sale — probably get you into the bestseller list, — but for an ancient book it’s almost unbelievable.
What has changed, and what is it that is leading to a steadily rising sale for Stoner, is that the world has now managed to evolve an animal called the “on-line influencer”. When Jack Edwards, or Hudson Williams, says they love a book, hundreds of people rush out and buy it. Stoner speaks particularly to the young, I guess, being as it is a tale about love and a university teacher. What makes a bestseller is people telling other people that this is a book they have to read. Publishers all know this — we just have no idea how to make this happen.
Here you can observe Jack Edwards at work. Stoner is the second book he presents (at between 4 minutes in and 7 minutes). Enthusiasm like this is golden!
If you don’t see a video here. please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser.
Twelve years ago I wrote one of the rare reviews to be published in this blog. I read William Stoner as a reader, reading his way through his life as he lived it. The novel on its first page lets us know that “few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses”. The only reason Stoner is remembered nowadays, it continues, is when an occasional student stumbles upon the medieval manuscript volume in “the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: ‘Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues’.” Well that forgotten life has had a late blossoming into bestsellerdom.
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* Wikipedia tells us that “Louis Kenton was the son of a flour and grain salesman from Philadelphia. Although little is known about his life, he was listed as a bookkeeper and clerk in that city’s directories between 1889 and 1891.”
Making Book 