on life & other inconveniences

Barbara Fister has written an interesting post that stems from a discussion about the tendency to follow trends, read buzz books, watch hyped movies, etc.  I don’t want to steal her thunder, because her post is excellent, so I’m just linking to it and adding a few thoughts and questions.

Barbara raises the question of how she decides what to read.  I’ve always had a bit of an aversion to over-hyped things, which may be part of the reason why I fall outside the mainstream, but I also had the experience of someone passing on a book to me that they admittedly bought “just to see what was on the bestseller lists these days”.  I loathed the book and it drove a key point home:  Just because it was selling well didn’t mean it wasn’t total crap.

Ultimately, I’ve reached the same conclusion Barbara has about referrals.  What about you?  How do you decide what to read next?  Do you think more people are reading the blockbusters, or has the internet expanded our access to more obscure titles?

THE LOVE GURU tanked at the box office opening weekend, opening in fourth place.

What does this have to do with selling snake oil to readers?  Well, this may be a bit of a stretch, so I’m going to preface this post by labeling it one big what if? 

It ties in with things I’ve been thinking about lately.  Part of it goes back to what Charlie Stella said in the comments on Bill Crider’s post, the one I was blogging about yesterday:

Yes, there are cliques and yes, they have some small level of influence (reviews and/or otherwise), but they are a virtual world unto themselves (for Christ’s fucking sake). If bad writing is being published/well reviewed and/or honored because bloggers/reviewers have influence, don’t kid yourself, the buying/reading public will be able discern the good from the bad over the long haul. All fame (in whatever form it comes and however it comes) is truly fleeting (or some of the published/well reviewed and/or honored wouldn’t have taken such hard falls). More importantly, who cares what (or who) “they” promote (whether in the form of authors, reviews and/or awards)? In the end, it’s always the same number of people paying attention (count them). 

Absolutely true.  Not even a fraction of a half of a quarter of one percent of all the readers who pick up every James Patterson offering are following the online community to the extent that would enable any said clique to exert a huge amount of influence.  There may be random examples of some plug online helping a person’s career, but it isn’t a universal truth, a certainty.  

But what about other forms of influence?  It was I.J. Parker’s response to something I said yesterday on Crimespace that collided with Charlie’s comment above:

Sales are influenced by more than public taste. They can be manipulated by the publisher in a million ways (not the least of which concerns availability in stores).
And if we are dealing with public taste, I have come to realize that the people who read because it’s a daily fix for them are not the people who buy books.

Sales push.  This is something we authors have to think about.  A lot.  Because short of having a lot of money or being friends with Oprah, Richard or Judy, there isn’t very much an author can do to really generate a lot of sales on their own.  It is publishers who handle distribution, and it is publishers who co-op space on bookstore shelves, and it is publishers that have the ability to get your book in front of readers.

Forget the online sales avenues for standard fiction.  The general figures I’ve heard tossed about are that online sales account for only about 10-15% of total sales.  If you want to be published and sell 200 copies of your book, you sign on with my first publisher.  If you want to see your book in bookstores and sell in the thousands, well…. you don’t sign with them.  Blogging, Spinetingler and my industry profile… none of that was going to enable a book available only online to sell a large number of copies.  In fact, sales for SC spiked again with the release of WHAT BURNS WITHIN.  The best the first book has done is to piggy-back off of the push of the second book by a different publisher.

Why mention it?  Well, it’s definitely true that publishers can make an author, but I think this is where Charlie’s comment comes back in to balance what I.J. said.  Only to a point.  This is where we play the what if? game.

- It’s said that in the United States, the percentage of readers (whatever benchmark they use to determine who’s a reader I do not know) is in decline.  Not a rapid thing, and maybe overall numbers are holding against population growth, but every now and again someone runs around like Chicken Little, screaming that the sky is falling on the publishing industry.

 
- Readership is not said to be in decline, but rather holding steady, in Canada.  In fact, last time I saw a newspaper throwing stats around, they were saying there are more readers per capita in Canada than the U.S.

-More money is invested in book promotion in the U.S. than Canada.