By April 30, 6,000 copies had been sold. It appeared in 10th place on the NYT bestseller list on May 11. It rose to number 9 the next week and then dropped, rallied to 8 on June 22, and then was off for good. 8,000 more copies sold through the rest of 1952. (The best selling novel of that year, The Silver Chalice by Thomas Costain, sold 250,000 copies). In May 1952, after deducting the advance, Random House paid Ellison $1,537, which included a Signet paperback reprint advance payment of $1500. His November check was $4,557. (image below is of the later UK edition)
What conclusions could we draw from these 7 years of writing, two different publishers, and one agent lost along the way, looked at through the lens of publishing per se? One is that Ellison, who had been writing and publishing and moving in literary circles since he had arrived in New York, and become friends with and mentored by Richard Wright, established himself in key circles as an important writer and thinker, and this led to novel’s success, along with the extenuated process of finishing the book, rumored for years by influential critics to be a masterpiece. Volkening was the first person from the book publishing world to reach out to him after reading a piece by him in a magazine, but by the time Random House was ready to launch the book, Ellison’s reputation and friends had done much of the marketing: he was friends with Stanley Hyman, Shirley Jackson, Kenneth Burke, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and many others; the book was chosen for review by Saul Bellow, Anthony Burgess, Irving Howe, George Mayberry, Wright Morris, and other names. It’s not clear the famous Bennett Cerf had an enormously active role in making the novel and Ellison the critical success they became (Erskine, who became the editor, did have a large role in shaping the book, a topic I’ve left off this newsletter); Cerf rode a wave that had already been built (and was, of course, the kind of publisher an ambitious writer would want to sign with). The endless blowing of deadlines, along with the rumors that Ellison was working on a masterpiece—the years-long build-up of suspense, the first chapter published as a standalone years before the novel was ready— created the buzz and market.
