Trust them, it's a hit

NEW YORK — Bonnie Nadel, a veteran Los Angeles literary agent, is weary of the questions she's constantly getting from Hollywood industry types: "They want to option a book for a movie or TV, and they'll ask how many copies the book has sold," Nadel said. "And I'll tell them I really don't know the exact number. I would need inside information, which is very hard to nail down."

The flabbergasted looks Nadel gets from people who are accustomed to poring over weekend movie grosses or overnight TV ratings underscores a telling reality about the not-so-modern book business. Publishers are notoriously reluctant to divulge sales numbers, and the complex, arcane nature of bookselling makes it hard to determine how well or badly a title is doing.

Now it's the publishing world's turn to be shocked, at a trial underway in Los Angeles pitting media mogul Philip Anschutz against author Clive Cussler. Anschutz says he bought the film rights to one of Cussler's books because he was told it had sold 100 million copies worldwide. Because of those staggering -- and bogus -- figures, Anschutz maintains, he paid $10 million for the film rights. The resulting film, the 2005 "Sahara," did poorly at the box office.

Some publishing industry observers, who declined to speak on the record, expressed incredulity that a businessman would pay so much money without verifying such a claim. But others suggest Anschutz behaved like many others when it comes to publishers' sales claims: In the absence of hard proof, he simply believed them.

Finding data about book sales got easier in 2001, when Nielsen BookScan, a New York-based firm, began compiling information that measured about 70% of the U.S. book market. Yet there is still confusion in the marketplace. BookScan records sales from major chain stores, a sampling of independent sellers, online firms like Amazon.com, plus Costco, Kmart, Target and Starbucks. But it does not track weekly sales from Wal-Mart, religious stores, gift shops, grocers, drugstores and other outlets.

Meanwhile, publishers routinely withhold full sales figures, saying the information is proprietary. The only people legally entitled to know those numbers are authors and their agents.

"The publishing business has never gone out of its way to report actual sales numbers because it has no real interest in doing so," said Albert Greco, a Fordham University economist who analyzes business trends in the book world. "It's hard to know what's real. If an author on TV talk says his book has sold 1 million copies, only a few people will know if that's true."