Too, and Too Little

Extract

During a discussion of my first book manuscript with a senior colleague, he informed me that an academic “best-seller” actually sells about 2,000 book copies. I was stunned. All this work and even if I am wildly successful, only 2,000 copies will circulate in the world? My colleague intended, I suppose, to humble me. Even more, it threw me into doubt (how could I have gotten so far and still be so naive?), and I continue to wonder many years later, why do we all work so hard to gain such a small audience? Now that academic journals are online, we can calculate the number of hits or downloads for each article. The results are disheartening for any of us who want our research to have an impact outside our academic discipline or subfield, let alone an impact on political life. Why do we labor over journal articles that will be read by so few people? (Of course, I am aware that the number of readers is a dubious measure for “evidence of impact.” Yet I have seen the sales ranking of books on Amazon.com and the tally of citations netted by a publication appear in promotion files many times as measures of “impact on the field.” Full disclosure: my Amazon sales ranking at the time of this writing is 287,537.)