Oh, Goody.

Posted on December 8, 2004    Posted by John Scalzi

The Publishers Weekly review of OMW has been put on the book’s Amazon page, so if you’d like to read the whole thing, it’s here. Thanks, Sue, for bringing it to my attention.

Friends who have had PW reviews before (including those with starred reviews) tell me the true value of the PW review is not how many units it shifts on Amazon but that it raises the profile of the work in the bookseller’s industry and among general reviewers, which makes sense to me. Let’s hope it works. But it’s also worth noting that the book of mine that has sold the best so far — Book of the Dumb — has received absolutely no critical attention whatsoever; it’s moved about 50,000 copies primarily through the publisher’s ability to pile up a big stack of them in the middle of a Sam’s Club traffic pattern. And God bless them for that. Knowing this datum keeps one’s perspective on reviews, shall we say, firmly grounded.