AS JOHN SUTHERLAND announced that John Banville’s The Sea had won this year’s Man Booker Prize, its publisher, Picador, pressed the button at its Suffolk-based printers for 30,000 extra copies to join the 28,000 in bookshops. The whole lot should be sold by the end of the year. Nothing shifts literary books better than the Booker.

Rodney Troubridge, a buyer for Waterstone’s, says: “It is the one award that really matters and we’d expect sales of a winner to increase tenfold.”

So in the week before the result was announced, booksellers and publishers of the shortlisted titles held secret talks to estimate potential orders for the winner and to strike deals allowing them to cut the price by up to 50 per cent. Mr Troubridge’s estimate proved conservative for The Sea. It had been the least attractive nominee to punters and pundits and before the announcement had sold only 4,622 copies. Within three days, sales had leapt by 1,900 per cent, no doubt helped by publicity from vituperative attacks by some critics.

Geoff Duffield, the sales and marketing director at Picador’s owner, Pan Macmillan, can barely disguise his glee. “Below it in the Amazon chart are huge brand names such as Dan Brown and Andy McNab, which tells you all you need to know about the impact of the prize,” he enthuses.

Mr Duffield has been here before. Picador published last year’s winner, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, and, when at HarperCollins, marketed Arundhati Roy’s 1997 winner The God of Small Things, which sold more than 1.5 million copies. Banville is unlikely to match that: Roy was on a roll before her win, a PR dream, beautiful and with a great story to tell after David Godwin, her agent, had doorstepped her in Kerala and won her a million-dollar deal.

Roy helped to ratchet up the Booker’s international profile, according to Martyn Goff, who has administered the prize for three decades.

“Interest in winners is now global,” he says. “Once upon a time in America it was only covered in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. Now the winner even gets a double page spread in the Fort Lauderdale Gazette.” Even Banville’s relatively low-key winner drew overseas orders for 25,000 copies from everywhere from the Netherlands to Nicaragua.

Some winners are bigger than others. Roy was big, as were Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, but all the winners become millionaires thanks to global coverage, film deals and membership of the most exclusive literary club in the world (there have been only 36 winners) which makes publishers open their cheque books.

But expectations have also grown. The Line of Beauty was deemed a failure judged by the standards set by Roy and Martel — it was even outsold by last year’s favourite, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. But it still sold 148,543 copies, not bad for a novel which features graphic gay sex.

Nobody really loses with the Booker. Even the most controversial choices sell — Keri Hulme’s The Bone People sold 38,000 copies in 1985 and is still in print. Booker winners never go out of print — for authors looking for immortality in an age when publishers delete books with shameless haste that is the biggest prize of all.

Booker bestsellers since 1998

1. Life of Pi by Yann Martel 1,062,853 (2002)



2. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood 442,039 (2000)



3. Vernon God Little by D. B C. Pierre 322,381 (2003)



4. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan 231,750 (1998)



5. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey 239,075 (2001)



6. Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee 199,694 (1999)



7. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst 148,543 (2004)



FIGURES BY NIELSEN BOOKSCAN BASED ON SALES THROUGH THE TOTAL CONSUMER MARKET MEASURED SINCE 1998

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