Two or three years ago, a friend visiting from London left me a copy of British author Samantha’s Harvey’s novel The Western Wind, which she’d bought to read on the plane. I’d never heard of Samantha Harvey, although she’d written three previous novels and been on the long- and shortlists for a slew of impressive prizes.
Reading the novel after my friend had left, I found it formally inventive, moving and beautifully written. It’s set in 1491 in the tiny English village of Oakham, and Harvey’s portrayal of the village and its people shows her mastery of research, the details she chooses making Oakham feel both alien and familiar. Her main character is the local priest, and the action is told backward from Day Four to Day One of the investigation into a death, one that might be murder.
Harvey’s next novel, Orbital, won the Booker Prize in 2024, and has become a bestselling literary sensation. Orbital is a short novel of 207 pages set entirely on board the International Space Station during a 24-hour orbit around the planet. Its four astronauts and two cosmonauts follow their routines, sometimes talking with people on earth.
It’s like a six-person diary, a report of the daily minutia of extraordinary lives. There’s not much drama, no conflict to speak of, and the book is as beautifully written and meticulously researched as The Western Wind. Both are literary novels, which some say is a genre of its own these days; a small one. I found Orbital plangent, absorbing, and vibrating with love for our poor endangered earth.
There. Two very short reviews of two books, both of which I loved reading. I’ll return to them later.
But I’m also interested in something a little more meta—or I would be if the word hadn’t been appropriated. Samantha Harvey’s books are very different from each other: a longish work of historical fiction set in a 15th century English village and a short contemporary novel set about 400 kilometers above the earth. I haven’t read her previous novels, but they sound unlike these latest two. They’re all set in modern England, but one is told in letter form, another features an elderly protagonist in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and the third involves the rivalry between two middle-aged brothers.
Writing such different books goes against modern publishing dicta. Writers are encouraged to stay in our lanes, setting out our stories in roughly the same place and time with similar characters—as, of course, some writers have always preferred to do. (Faulkner. Yoknapatawphna County.). That means readers know what they’re going to get when, for instance, they pick up the latest Sally Rooney novel. (Dublin. Millennials.) Anyone writing genre novels is advised to think in terms of trilogies, carrying the same characters forward in linked adventures. But sowing familiar characters in literary novels is popular with publishers, too.
Why? They believe familiarity breeds sales. I got that message explicitly several years ago when the manuscript of one of my novels was rejected by an editor I admired. She emailed my then-agent that she loved the novel, but her marketing people were against taking it. They said I wrote novels about so many different places and subjects, they didn’t know how to sell my work. Sorry.
It stung at the time, but before reading Samantha Harvey’s latest novel, I hadn’t thought about it in years. Afterward, I discussed it with my editor. My former editor. She’s moved on to teaching, but over the years she acquired and edited four of my books. I told her that I like to think of my work as being identifiably mine; that I feel I have a recognizable style and recurrent themes. Does she see that? And what about the industry question. Can books that are superficially dissimilar build an audience?
Hum, she said. Your novels are very different. They’re set in different places (Brazil, Canada, England) and in different time periods (19th, 20th, 21st centuries). Some of the novels jump between settings and eras, and in one, the characters travel through time. To me, she said, what they have in common is the fact the protagonists are so well rounded. You do great characters.
Thank you, I replied. But what does that mean about sales?
“Nobody knows what sells these days,” she said.
That’s something I’ve heard often lately, including from a publicist friend. She told me that two of her colleagues have quit lately because they don’t know how to sell books anymore. It’s true big showbiz stars usually sell hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies of their memoirs (although some, unpredictably, don’t earn back their advances). Established writers of sci fi and romance sell one title after another, as do the literary giants. Thank you Margaret Atwood and Stephen King for supporting half the industry
But they’re a tiny minority among writers, and the rest are left at sea as the publicists struggle to get our work in front of the public. Or we struggle, since writers are expected to line up at least half the publicity these days, the 50 per cent figure sometimes specified in contracts. Very few established media outlets review books anymore, and there are a pathetic number of clicks on the reviews they publish. National radio sells books, the better podcasts do, if you can get on them. For a while it looked as if online influencers did as well, but it turns out they only really sell their own products effectively.
BookTok rose like a whale surfacing but it’s already in the process of crashing back down. Writing festivals can raise a writer’s profile. But I was talking to a writer friend not long ago who spent 2024 on the festival circuit. She told me that while her events were well attended, the booksellers didn’t sell many books. Instead, more than a few people came up to tell her they’d loved her reading and planned to get her book out of the library. When one of her good friends told her that, she cussed them out.
Buy one. You can afford it. Do you know how long it took me to write the goddamn thing?
Winning a big prize is the one guaranteed way of selling literary novels, which helps explain Orbital’s reach. But since I’m thinking about marketting, I wish I knew the extent to which its popularity has stoked the sales of Samantha Harvey’s previous novels. If you have a hit book, is that a way—maybe the only way—to re-ignite interest in your older titles?
No one is giving out Harvey’s sales figures, nor should they. But maybe there’s one way to roughly measure. On the fan site Goodreads, Orbital received 61,357 ratings as of March 5. That’s huge for a literary novel, especially one that hasn’t been made into a hit movie or streamer. (The Handmaid’s Tale had 2,227,274 ratings when I logged on that day, and I watched the number rising.)
However, The Western Wind had a more modest 4,507 ratings, with only nine new Goodreads reviews posted in February. Harvey’s third novel had 1,053. Her first had 123. This suggests to me that a prize sells the book that wins it, and maybe helps the ones the author publishes next, but not her work as a whole.
There’s also the question of how many books are sold as a result of winning a prize these days, and how many are taken out of the library, which is as important to the publishers’ bottom line as it is to writers’ incomes. People are having a hard time lately and library borrowing is increasing, especially now that libraries offer e-books and audiobooks through Libby and Overdrive. You don’t need to leave your house to get a book, and maybe you want one more than usual when the weather is bad, or you’re so busy you can’t sleep.
I’ve been having a weirdly informative experience on Goodreads myself with my 2021 time travel novel, Time Squared. About a year and a half after it was published, the Goodreads numbers rose precipitously for no reason I’ve ever figured out, eventually settling into a regular chug. It had received 1,998 ratings by March 5. Most are from the United States with notably few from Canada—probably as many as there are from other English-speaking countries like England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, and I’ll throw in South Africa. There are also a surprising number of ratings from countries where English isn’t a national language, especially in Europe.
Obviously, not every single person who reads a book posts a rating on Goodreads. What’s the ratio? Three, four, maybe five times as many people have either read the novel or listened to the audiobook as have posted a rating? Does that add up to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 international readers? There’s no reliable way to know. People on Goodreads who review Time Squared often write about getting the novel or audiobook through Libby, and Libby’s figures are as closely guarded as Amazon’s. The non-Goodreads thousands must have borrowed their copies as well, since my publisher reports that sales of Time Squared this past year have been “mild.” In publisher speak, that’s one step down from the “modest,” and doesn’t come close to “encouraging,” much less, “When will your next book be ready?”
So here’s a case where the readership has been excellent. Sales? No.
I suspect it’s not the only one.
I bring all of this up because of the advice given writers to stay in their lane to try to increase sales. Since publishers can no longer rely on the classic methods of selling books, I wonder why they expect the classic advice helps anymore, either. Sally Rooney has done well by following the rules. So has Samantha Harvey by breaking them. My friend the publicist says she’s hanging on to see what happens next.
“It’s just so interesting,” she says. “The disruption.”
Remembering that she’s talking to a writer: “For those of us with a salary. However bloody modest.”
***
As to Samantha Harvey’s novels.
Harvey is a meticulous craftsperson, and the two books of hers I’ve read are wonderfully written, the prose as fluid as rivers. That’s chiefly what they have in common; that and their intelligence. Which is to say, Harvey’s intelligence. I gave up on another bestselling book last weekend, highly recommended, an adult novel that reads as if it was written for inattentive twelve-year-olds. Or by one. I ended up tossing it toward a table. It missed, and as I stared at it on the floor, I thought of a U.S. study showing that more than 50 per cent of Americans aged between 18 and 75 read at or below a Grade 6 level.
That’s not Harvey’s audience.
“Out there on the nadir of the craft,” she writes in Orbital, “is the unit that Pietro and Nell installed on their spacewalk the week before, a spectrometer that measures the radiance of the earth. It sweeps a seventy-kilometer swathe of the planet as the craft orbits, moving from continent to continent, north and south, an obsessive eye watching, gathering, calibrating light.”
I’ve said the book follows the astronauts and cosmonauts through a routine day, and on one level, that’s all it really does. They track a typhoon making landfall in Asia. One of the astronauts learns that her mother has died. We realize that another has grown estranged from his wife. Harvey thanks NASA and the European Space Agency for their help in her research, and she has imbued the book with both detail and authority. This isn’t Star Wars. No caped figure races around yelling, “We have to save the earth!” But it grows clear that the earth needs saving, and deserves it; that’s Harvey’s point. And that maybe humanity does, too.
The Western Wind is a far more elaborate project, not least in its reverse narration, with the action starting on the fourth day after a man’s death and working back, day by day, to what happened on the first one, when he apparently died by drowning. It’s set in the damp medieval village of Oakham, where the dead man was an important local citizen. He has either been murdered or committed suicide, and in 1491, death by suicide is as great a crime as murder.
A senior cleric from outside the village arrives to investigate what happened, so it’s a murder mystery, in its way. But the cleric isn’t our hero. That’s the village priest, Reve, who is either a witness or a suspect, and the eyes through which we see a very different world. He’s also a complicated man. What’s that the visiting cleric sees going on between Reve and a village woman? We only eventually learn ourselves as we retreat toward Day One.
Again, Harvey must have done an intense amount of research to portray a very different time. Yet she weaves her learning through the novel without overburdening her prose. Too many historical novelists pack in every tasty little bit of research they’ve found, until their paragraphs bulge like overloaded suitcases.
Not Harvey.
“We went back across the fields,” says the priest, Reve, the narrator. “In that direction my skirts flowed out behind me like a bridal gown while the cassock underneath slapped at my shins—and I beg pardon for talking so much about what was happening at my lower leg, but so would anyone whose skirts weighed the same as two buckets of water and behaved like something living.”
How did the past feel?
How does it feel to be weightless in space?
I’m glad Samantha Harvey ignores outdated publishing strictures and roams where she pleases. I’m delighted that she’s being rewarded, and can’t wait to read her next book. In the meantime, I’ve ordered one of her previous ones, the first one, All is Song. (She’s good with titles, too.)