Once more, J.K. Rowling has a hit on her hands, as Robert Galbraith follows Richard Bachman with 'cancer of the pseudonym' and 'The Cuckoo's Calling' becomes a best-seller.
An interesting experiment has been unfortunately curtailed, and we'll never know just how successful Galbraith's detective series would have been. Now that the true author has been outed, the series is going to be a guaranteed hit. But it was already on course to do just that. As a debut novel the 1500 hardback copies shipped, with around 500 sales, was an impressive number given the circumstances of a saturated genre, a debut author, and little marketing spend behind the title. Rowling more than likely had another hit series on her head as Galbraith, and it would have been delightful to get to book three or four in the series, a potential movie deal in place, Patterson Joseph cast as Cormoran Strike, and then do the reveal.
Much like Stephen King's pseudonym of Bachman, who was ready to publish 'Misery' and break into the A-list author category before the cover was broken, Galbraith had a career calling to him. How far he would have got will remain a point of speculation for the public, and an unanswered question in the mind of Rowling.
But the real winners here are the online eBook stores. Turning on my Kindle this morning, and the crime novel that had shipped around 1500 copies, with around 500 public sales up until this weekend was now front and center, next to Dan Brown. Why the sudden change? Why indeed.
With book shops genuinely caught out and lacking stock (surely the biggest sign this wasn't some fascinating long-con), anyone who wanted a copy of The Cuckoo's Calling was going to have to go digital. The Kindles of the world are likely going to be the only place to read the adventures of Strike for the next few days. It wouldn't surprise me if the book turns out to be one of the biggest selling eBooks of the year - from the lowest reaches of the charts sales rocketed 158,000% and it hit the number one spot on Amazon.
For all the tactile love, rich smells, and physical nature, of a new book, when the world had a sudden need to read a certain book, all at the same time, they turned to eBooks, portable readers, and software on their smartphones. The words are just as important, but the acceptance of the deliver mechanism is of far more interest to me.
With very few barriers in place, the world reached out to a digital bookshelf, there was a copy waiting for them, and you could read it just a few minutes later. It all just works.
