Hey, Wait: The Book Industry Just Slipped Into Chaos!

It took nearly twelve hours after yesterday’s blind item about speculation that the major commercial imprint which lost two franchise authors this month might be secretly relieved by the lightening of its ledgers, but the thought finally occurred to us: If the departure of Richard Ford from Knopf, after his last novel sold just 51,000 copies to Nielsen Bookscan-reporting outlets, can be cited as evidence in New York that all is topsy-turvy in the republic of letters, shouldn’t the departure of a NY Times-bestselling author who’d been with the same house even longer than Ford was at Knopf and has been known to sell approximately four times the number of hardcovers Ford does, without taking years between books, be treated like a sign of the apocalypse?

Anyone want to place odds on when New York will get around to that follow-up? (Meanwhile, the trades—well, okay, PW is taking the news completely in stride. There is a story here, but it’s not so much about one author changing houses as about the broader publishing strategy reflected in that acquisition and other recent deals.)

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