Tangent, but I hope it's interesting:
>>Novelist Scott Turow says he's long been frustrated by the industry's failure to study its customer base. "I once had an argument with one of my publishers when I said, 'I've been publishing with you for a long time and you still don't know who buys my books,' and he said, 'Well, nobody in publishing knows that,' " says Mr. Turow, president of the Authors Guild. "If you can find out that a book is too long and you've got to be more rigorous in cutting, personally I'd love to get the information."
Others worry that a data-driven approach could hinder the kinds of creative risks that produce great literature. "The thing about a book is that it can be eccentric, it can be the length it needs to be, and that is something the reader shouldn't have anything to do with," says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "We're not going to shorten 'War and Peace' because someone didn't finish it."<<
Interesting that the article paired these two paragraphs, because Farrar, Straus & Giroux WAS Scott Turow's original publisher, and Jonathan Galassi was his editor. And yes, I'm sure they had no idea what to do with him or who was reading his books (even as Scott Turow was saving their company) because they publish literary fiction and not courtroom thrillers.
http://harvardmagazine.com/1997/11/books.html
Turow is no longer published by FSG.
eP