The queue of readers stretched across the Pioneer Women's Gardens. Their goal was a young woman sitting at a desk in the distance, busy signing books. An overseas star? No, it was our own Hannah Kent, author of the bestselling debut novel, Burial Rites, and I got a nice warm glow thinking how well she was doing.

Or was she? That was at Adelaide Writers Week in 2014, and now The Wall Street Journal paints a different picture. According to an article by Jennifer Maloney, sales of Burial Rites in the US have been "clearly disappointing". Little, Brown acquired the North American rights in 2012 for a seven-figure, two-book deal. To date, it's sold about 88,000 copies.

Hannah Kent, of Adelaide, author of the bestselling debut novel, Burial Rites. Credit:David Mariuz

Those would be phenomenal sales for a literary novel in Australia, but they didn't satisfy Little, Brown's publisher, Reagan Arthur. "I remember that we all thought it was a great big, commercially appealing, interesting novel," he told the WSJ. "Obviously, it's always a gamble at any level."

It's always a gamble, but just at the moment, the international stakes for newcomers who have written a literary novel with commercial prospects can be outrageously high. Publishers are locked in frenzied bidding wars for a very small number of books.