After spotting yesterday's item on some prominent "hits and misses" of 2007, somebody who claims to be a staffer at Riverhead wanted to throw in an extra, anonymous show of support for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which was tossed into the "miss" pile because it had only sold 27,000 copies to Nielsen Bookscan-reporting outlets. (The not-so-serious criterion for success or failure was whether a book had sold more or less than If I Did It.) "Those AP numbers are WAY OFF," claims this inside source. "We're on the fourth printing of Oscar Wao (in three months!) and total numbers are over 90,000... Diaz will easily sell 100,000 in hardcover, which for a literary writer is EXTRAORDINARY."

Of course, announcing that you have 90,000 copies of a novel in print isn't the same as announcing that you've sold 90,000 copies of a novel. Let's assume, because it makes the math simpler, that Bookscan's 27,000 reported sales really do represent 70 percent of the total market performance. That would put Oscar Wao at roughly 38,600 total copies sold in three months—a number that makes the 90,000-in-print sound like a plausible roll of the dice on Riverhead's part. Still, that's an average of just under 13,000 copies a month for the three months it's been out.* Getting to 100,000 hardcover sales "easily"? It's not impossible, but it will most likely depend on all those appearances in various "best of 2007" lists, and maybe a subsequent bump in word-of-mouth, building some serious traction to accelerate current sales and keep the novel out on display in bookstores as the 2008 releases start crowding the shelves.

A source at Riverhead would neither confirm nor deny the asserted figure, citing a general company policy against giving out numbers, but maintained that "Junot has been a critical and commercial success—and an artistic triumph."

*Of course, for most literary novelists, 13,000 copies a month in hardcover is cause for celebration, so I hate to make any of this sound like it's demeaning Diaz's achievement.