Beware Literary Snobbery: Why We Should Read Bestsellers

[Jude Hardin]

Nice article by James W. Hall in the Wall Street Journal.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/04/08/beware-literary-snobbery-...

[Jude Hardin]

I think you nailed it, Jon. Ha, ha, ha!

[Brian Hoffman]

Aro said, "Ha, ha, ha.  I don't need no stinkin' ha, ha, ha.

[Jude Hardin]

Sales is IMO an imperfect measure of value. Factors include: luck, timing, marketing, i.e., things that have little or nothing to do with literature.

I agree many factors come into play for an author to hit it big, but I think there has to be something there in the first place. Something intrinsic that strikes a chord with a large segment of the reading population. Why do so many people think Stephanie Meyers is so great? She's obviously giving them something they want. Luck and marketing will only take you so far. Otherwise, publishers could just create bestsellers by spending x amount of dollars on marketing, and every book published would be a huge monetary success. And of course we know that's not the case.

[John McFetridge]

It's true, there's a randomness to it. As Jon said, luck, timing, there are a lot of factors.

I know this doesn't mean much to people here, but the NHL playoffs start this week and for those of us in Toronto it really drives home the point that something can be incredibly profitable and still not make the playoffs, year after year.

Hey, maybe it isn't all luck and timing...

[Dana King]

Ron Wilson started to laugh. "Ha, ha, ha," he chuckled. "Guess it wasn't me after all."

(Only hockey fans will get this reference. Sorry.)

[I. J. Parker]

I disagree.  Heavy promotion does create bestsellers.  The fact that publishers strike out from time to time doesn't disprove the power of the publicity machine.

 

The Meyer books address YA and rely on hormonal changes.  That almost always works as a subject.  Yes, you can write to an audience.  But would you want to?  The Da Vinci Code attacked the Catholic church when that pleased the majority of Americans, gave women's liberation a theory to build on, involved international intrigue, and cast a monster as its serial killer.  It also pretended to have done deep and revolutionary research into the origins of the Christian faith and found a shocking revelation there and in Da Vinci's Last Supper.  Now why wouldn't a book like that sell in the millions?  The quality of the writing doesn't matter to the readers of Meyer and whatshisname.

[Eric Christopherson]

Ingrid won't even type his name. Ha, ha, ha! I chuckle.

[Eric Christopherson]

Agreed, Jude. Patterson, Meyers, Brown--they have some talent and some skill, just not all the skills of a novelist. They're missing tools from their toolbox to reference Stephen King's On Writing. (Or they simply don't choose to wield all the tools.) And many readers don't care.

[Jude Hardin]

I disagree.  Heavy promotion does create bestsellers.

If that's the case, why don't the major publishers heavily promote every title they release? Then publishing would be a sure thing, instead of the crapshoot we all know it is.

Four out of five traditionally-published books lose money. If the Big 6 could avoid tanking on 80% of their product by paying for some promo up front, wouldn't they?

Promotion helps, but word of mouth is what really sells books. That or a film being made and becoming popular, or some kind of crazy luck like what happened with The Bridges of Madison County and The Da Vinci Code. If you could bottle that kind of mania, someone would have done it long ago.

[John McFetridge]

Four out of five traditionally-published books lose money.

 

And 100% of Hollywood movies lose money if you have a back-end deal. We can never really know the truth about this stuff.

But we do know that there is a finite amount of customers - ebooks actually introduced a new market (there's some overlap, of course, but also new buyers) but it's not infinite. Bookshelf space a lot like seats in movie theatres, the market potential isn't really endless, so even publishers know that there can't be 5000 books that each sell a million in a year. 4000? 1000?

Every title can't be promoted to the same extent because it requires capital and even for these publishers that's not unlimited. So budgets are set and some books get promoted more than others. Yes, there has to be something there to begin with - I read a line yesterday that compared it to wiggling a loose tooth with your tonge - if it isn't at least a little bit loose to start with you can't move it at all - but then what we see is a lot of jumping on a little word of mouth and pushing it hard.

I just wish the stuff that got that word of mouth wasn't almost always teenager books or Fifty Shades of Gray...

 

[I. J. Parker]

As John says, they cannot throw that much money at every title. So they play a guessing game.  Most of their new authors get no promotion whatsoever and are dropped if they don't make an immediate impact.  Guess what:  the promoted authors do quite well.  The unpromoted authors disappear.  Yes, miracles happen, but who believes in winning the lottery?

The unfairness comes in when the publicity funds are all given to two or three authors, while the publisher has signed 50 more in case something comes of it.  The 50 go into that contract expecting the same amount of attention as everyone else. They don't realize they are playing the lottery and are expected to fail.

I don't know about the money-losing statistics.  They sound like the publisher's math.  We know that the publisher starts earning on a title long before the advance is earned out.  The figures on cost vs. intake have been run, and the publishers' claims are hugely inflated when it comes what they consider breaking even.

Add to that the fact that the present system allows stores to return unsold books after a month or two.  After that time period, the book is no longer on the shelves and might as well be dead.  You can see how the whole business practically guarantees failure. 

 

That is, unless you get a 6-figure advance (in which case the publisher protects his investment).

[Dana King]

All good points. Another thing to consider is what is meant by "80% of books don't earn out." That means those that do must make a LOT of money for the publishers, or they would have gone out of business long ago. Money is coming in from somewhere.

The problem with publishing--aside from a woefully outdated business model--is its an insider industry that got taken over by least common denominator interests. Houses were once largely run by readers for readers. No one got rich--except for a few hot authors--and margins were small, but that was okay. It was understood as being that kind of business.

Now companies with little or no interest in anything but profit have stepped in to run them, but left  the general model in place, "fixing" it by cutting resources instead of altering the process. They expect an industry that was never about making large sums of money to make large sums of money and don;t understand why it doesn't respond to the same stimuli as their other businesses..