The sophomore jinx
Wesley Yang has written an interesting piece in the New York Observer on the plight of the second-time novelist whose “promising” first novel failed to meet its publisher’s sales expectations. Yang looks at the case of New York author Sam Lipsyte, whose second novel, Home Land, was rejected by 24 American publishing houses before it was finally sold to a U.K. publisher. The novel won rave reviews in England and was finally released early this year in the U.S., where it has also been critically praised and is selling modestly well. Yang attributes the initial round of rejections to a publishing and media obsession with hot, new faces, quoting Grove/Atlantic Books publisher Morgan Entrekin, who says, “the media has this voracious hunger for the new next thing. It’s much easier to sell that. That’s just a reality of today.” This obsession with untried talent often leaves authors like Lipsyte, whose first novel was released on Sept. 11, 2001 and did not perform as well as expected, with decidedly downscaled expectations for their later works.
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Read the New York Observer piece
