A nice little study with some (though too few ...) hard numbers, as BookNet Canada and Nielsen Book analyzed Canadian and international sales data for Alice Munro's titles before and after her Nobel win, in Alice Munro, At Home and Abroad: How the Nobel Prize in Literature Affects Book Sales (warning ! dreaded pdf format !).
(For those satisfied with press release-summary, see theirs.)
Mostly they just deal with percentage changes -- which look impressive, but then you remember how low average sales are without Nobel-prodding ..... So, for example, comparing the pre-announcement-period to the announcement week:
Mostly they just deal with percentage changes -- which look impressive, but then you remember how low average sales are without Nobel-prodding ..... So, for example, comparing the pre-announcement-period to the announcement week:
During that week, sales increased from 94 units to a height of 6,345 units for all of Munro's titles, a 6650% increaseGreat that the Nobel helped shift so many copies ... but 94 units of this prolific author's books in the entire week (when she was already getting more coverage -- there was a lot of Munro-Nobel buzz in the Canadian press leading up to the announcement) ... ? Sigh.