The U.S. publishers describe sales as "strong," but their first edition print run of each book in the series has declined consistently and considerably, with
File Under's print run particularly miniscule. Here are the figures, as far as I can find them:
?1: 1 million.
?2: 750k.
File Under: 150k.
?3: 500k.
?4: 200k.
Without knowing much about publishing statistics, I can't say if that might not be normal. Readers will tend to drop off later in a series rather than earlier, and a large first print run might help to establish a profile, bookstore presence, without necessarily intending to sell all of those books immediately.
A more reliable indication is the fact that the U.K. publishers felt the need to alter the format of the books. Their first edition of ?1 was the same size as their original editions of ASoUE, but Egmont claimed it was getting "lost" among larger-format books, and upped the size considerably for ?2 onwards as well as altering the colour pattern of the spines to be brighter and more eye-catching. There's also the fact that Egmont have the rights for
File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents but haven't published it (though they have
imitated its cover art). This is more tenuous, but I'd also suggest that there are signs that Egmont handed over responsibility for the U.K. cover design of ATWQ to somebody with
very little experience in graphic design. Edit: Although on a related note, the American publishers Little, Brown & Co. did feel the need to hire somebody to design a "
more commercial" cover, but for some reason they have never acknowledged this edition online and don't seem to have sent proper cover art to retailers (all the images I've seen are clearly scans of the physical edition).
It is harder to gauge the popularity of the series online because the state of online communication has changed enormously. Instead of people flooding to forums, they meme into the void on social media and don't actually discuss anything because the format of their chosen sites simply wasn't created to facilitate discussion. People are also very ignorant; I've seen people ask, with the use of hashtags, what ever happened to Lemony Snicket, when simply clicking on their own hashtag would have revealed to them that ATWQ had been ongoing for several years. At any rate, it's hard to do a like-for-like comparison, although ASoUE's online, forum-based fandom was always a lot more niche than its sales figures would suggest; ASoUE was something that a lot of people read but not many people felt moved to discuss, which has always been the case for a lot of books.
The vibe I get from this thread is that the books are better than ever but the sales are worse, for which a number of factors can be attributed. Some favour the explanation that the ending of ASoUE left enough people feeling "betrayed" or "burned" that it soured them on the author entirely, and much though I will defend
The End, it has to be said that it's not a wrong explanation. I would also point out that ATWQ began six years after ASoUE ended, with Lemony Snicket not publishing anything of a high profile for the same audience of readers during that six-year period, so he rather ceased to be a household name or to be identified as a current author, with the result that by the time ATWQ rolled around nobody was particularly interested and his main audience hadn't heard of him, though they might have seen his long series of slimline volumes as a staple on bookstore and library shelves.
But my main pet peeve is that the covers so badly misjudged the tone of ATWQ and of Lemony Snicket as an author that they actively deterred readers, pitching themselves at an audience quite different from the level of the text. There are audiences that like to read things that look serious, and audiences that like to read things that look silly, and if you put ASoUE and ATWQ in front of the former and latter audiences I know which they'll pick. The publishers flat-out called it wrong by patronising their audience, which Snicket never does. We're talking about publishers who thought it was necessary to, at the last minute, change the title of
File Under: Suspicious Incidents to
File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents, destroying the meaning of the title because they thought readers were too stupid to understand the format.
I'm pretty steamed about how both the American and British publishers have handled ATWQ, basically.