While no Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction this year, it didn’t hurt book sales as many booksellers worried.
In fact, the controversial press may have helped sales for Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, all of which were nominated.
The New York Observer has more: “Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists were spiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm.”