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.)