ABSTRACT
Visions of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), which has made a lot of money from sales in the hundreds of thousands, seem to fill their mind's eye. Few nonfiction volumes ever reach the lofty commercial pinnacles of Diamond's works, and those that do almost always take off in the marketplace by sheer chance. The trade market includes fiction and nonfiction, each with specialized genres. Nonfiction includes biography, cookbooks, history, self-help, science, and so on. Archaeology is a loosely defined genre that overlaps into history and science. The best-selling nonfiction trade books in archaeology and history are those that cross several market boundaries. Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey's Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, about Australopithecus afarensis, is a classic example. Houses like California, Cambridge, Florida, and Oxford have enjoyed notable success with high-end general books aimed at a much broader audience than their usual academic readership.
