Often said, but true. (statistics confirming the notion that literary prizes boost book sales)(Brief Article)

Economist (US), The, January, 1998

JIM CRACE'S novel, "Quarantine", can expect a nice sales bounce with the announcement on January 6th in London that it has won the Whitbread novel award. If you allow for book-trade technicalities, it turns out that conven- tional wisdom is right: literary prizes really do boost sales. The charts below show the jump that Arundhati Roy's novel, "The God of Small Things", took on winning Britain's Booker prize last autumn, and that Patrick Rambaud's "La Bataille" got when it won France's Prix Goncourt.

In America, Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain" was already a bestseller on winning the National Book Award. But sales had peaked, only to pick up again sharply. Note that French and American big figures are publishers' sales to bookshops.