So I'm looking at AP publishing correspondent Hillel Italie's assessment of the hits and misses of 2007, and he and I seem to have different ideas of what constitutes a "miss." I don't disagree with him about the weak sales on the Hillary Clinton biographies, or the disappointing performance of Valerie Plame Wilson's Fair Game. (And, yes, an anonymous guttersnipe did predict to GalleyCat the ex-spy's memoir wouldn't sell much; of course, that was only after the same would-be expert tried to convince me the book was never going to come out, that it wouldn't hit the bestseller lists when it was published, and that people were going to be fired over it—the exact opposite, you'll notice, of everything that happened to the book. Isn't it nice to be able to give yourself unlimited mulligans?)

However, I was quite frankly surprised that Italie branded Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao a "miss" apparently on the sole basis of the 27,000 sales reported by Nielsen Bookscan. Frankly, for a debut literary novel, even one as highly anticipated by critics as Diaz's, 27,000 sales in hardcover seems like a pretty impressive start—although I'll concede that I don't know how much Riverhead paid for it, or what their internal expectations were. Is the logic behind the assessment that a novel which is on just about every major media outlet's "best of" list, and has spent several weeks on the NY Times extended bestseller list, needs numbers closer to those posted by A Thousand Splendid Suns before it's a legitimate hit? Well, Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award, and it's only sold 38,000 copies; should we consider Denis Johnson a flop artist, too? As I pointed over the summer, this is why we have paperbacks...

Paul Crichton, the director of publicity for Simon & Schuster's children's division, took similar issue with Italie's low grade for Susan Patron's Newbery-winning novel The Higher Power of Lucky, which Bookscan tells us sold 50,000 copies. "If being a #1 New York Times bestseller and staying on the NYT bestseller list for 15 weeks is a 'Miss for 2007,'" Crichton emailed, "then I wish all our titles were misses. I am confused as to why the AP would do a feature on how all the librarians who were complaining of the word 'scrotum' are all taking the book (which Hillel wrote about), then consider the book a 'miss' because of a 50K Bookscan number. I would only hope that the AP realizes that those same librarians that [Italie] wrote about as all carrying the book are not Bookscan reported sales." Not to mention that most children's authors would be very glad indeed to sell 50,000 hardcovers, especially after their publishers had only committed to a 10,000-copy first printing. It ain't Harry Potter—speaking of which, where's Deathly Hallows on that hit list?—but, then again, what is?

I guess it all goes back to the point I was making yesterday: Maybe a strict emphasis on absolute numbers, rather than contextualizing a book's performance in relationship to its place in the market ecosphere, isn't the most useful criteria by which to judge publishing success. Maybe there's some small independent publisher which has had the biggest hit of its history this year, and its sales wouldn't even be a blip on HarperCollins's or Simon & Schuster's radar, but for that small publisher, and for whoever wrote that book, it's a promise of even more success to come. And maybe that publisher, or that author, will let me tell that story.