I hate it when Authors put their name on books in HUGE Letters and have the title in very small letters... I work at a bookstore and i almost every book in the front had the author name in size 30 font and the title in size 8. /end rant
It is done a lot with "name" authors in particular. For example, can anyone, without looking, name the last Stephen King novel that came out? If I were to post that "Licey's Story" is a great book, would you know what it is about, or who it was written by? The point is, the author sells the book moreso than the title of the book. When The Da Vinci Code came out, Dan Brown became an overnight sensation. That ledto massive reprints of his old books, and, in turn, his name became much more prominent on the cover because people were just like to buy Dan Brown books, regardlessof what the title was. And Licey's Story is the latest Stephen King novel, FWIW.
Publishers do that and I find it rather convenient. I've never bought a book for its title (Christopher Brookmyre's novels being the exception to the rule) but I got this list of about 50 authors or so - yeah, I read a lot - whom I'll read frequently and having their new novel "jump" at me in the bookstore is pretty convenient and saves me the trouble of tracking them. Duma Key is
Stephen King, John Grisham and Tom Clancy are the only current authors I can think of that merits that type of treatment. Their names sell books ... period.
Names in general sell books, period. Titles don't sell anything. Doesn't matter if it is a high profile author or a special interest kind of thing; titles don't sell. As an aside, I could think of 50 authors in a heartbeat who sell as good as those three do.
Bookstores are a blast this time of year, aren't they JT? I worked at B&N in Miami and Seattle, and managed a Walden in Seattle; few things beat the excitement of the Christmas season in the book business.
