Jeff Pearlman on Walter Payton

Or building a diverse portfolio in the stock market to spread the risk. You still look for stocks, i.e. books, with strong fundamentals that might take off. But book-buying being largely a zero-sum game, only a handful of them will. It seems to be a business where a large number of people gravitate to a small number of titles, rather than one where the reading is spread around. So you have a small percentage of books selling a very high amount of the overall copies. But, with some exceptions, it's tough to know which ones, particularly just based on a proposal for a book that won't hit shelves for two years or longer. A great example of Gene Wojo's "Cub Nation" book. I'm sure he got a handsome advance for it prior to the 2004 season, because the publisher was betting that the Cubs would win the World Series that year. The fact that they didn't even make the playoffs surely hurt sales. You can't forecast the market ahead of time with any exactitude. You can only play the percentages.

 

I bet NBA books would be a tough sell today.

 

Joe Nocera in the New York Times this morning on why biographies are best written after the subject is dead. He's writing about Steve Jobs and Walter Isaacson, but I thought it was just as applicable to this thread, with some chiming in - along with much of the general public - that Payton isn't here "to defend himself":

"When you think about it, it is rare for a truly great biography to be written about someone who is living; in my lifetime, the only one I can think of is 'The Power Broker,' Robert Caro's monumental biography of Robert Moses. When the subjects are alive - and Jobs was still alive when this book was finished - biographers always feel them looking over their shoulders, and pushing back. ...

"There is another kind of distance biographies of the living lack - the distance of time. It can take decades to truly understand the context in which the subject's life and achievements played out. Often we need to see what happens after he is gone to realize his true impact on our world."

Nocera's argument may seem novel to the general public - that Jobs's participation actually diminished the work. But I think it should make some sense to most of us.