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The biggest issue is that there are lots of writers and wannabe writers, but not very many readers in the US, not compared to other countries. (On the other han
by 21723 4y ago
The biggest issue is that there are lots of writers and wannabe writers, but not very many readers in the US, not compared to other countries. (On the other hand, the US book market is huge, so we have that to our advantage.) And, for an ugly secret, most of the people who make the big decisions in the literary world don't really read more than the casual reader (who still reads more than 97% of the population, but that's another topic.)
If you actually become a lead title, you're going to get lots of interviews with famous people who didn't actually read your book, but who had interns skim it and prepare questions. (Jon Stewart was a notable exception; he did try to read all the guest books.) Editors and literary agents do generally read the works they select and produce, but not in the same way--it's more like 200-page-per-hour skimming--and it's not because they're lazy--far from it--but because they're overworked. Which is why the difference between a dead-end deal with a four-digit advance and no marketing and a seven-figure balls-out launch is based on Hollywood-style four-quadrant analyses and favor-trading rather than the quality of the work itself.
The good news is that so much of these things authors get worked up about don't actually matter all that much. It might be infuriating to learn that you're not getting a book tour, but typical book tours don't actually drive that many sales relative to the effort they require of the author. It's very hard to predict what will drive sales; I know people who've had national TV spots and only sold ~20 copies from them.
- mbg721 4y agoHow is the book market huge, if there aren't any readers? Do you mean that books produced in the US are widely exported?
- 21723 4y ago330 million people, plus 38 more in a neighboring country who speak the same language (and are, therefore, arguably part of the same market). Plus, people still buy books even if the readership rate is low. Mostly, though, it's our population. If you're a Hungarian-language novelist and you sell to 0.1% of the total market (this is hard to do) you've made food money for a couple years. If you can find a way to get 0.1% of Americans to buy your book, you're a millionaire. Of course, even getting people to hear about you at all is difficult, especially with "book buzz" hype machines [1] sucking up so much oxygen while delivering disappointing or forgettable books. ---- [1] This is the part of traditional publishing I don't like. When bad books get so 7-figure advances and huge marketing campaigns, they cause reader attrition at a population level and this makes the world scarcer for serious writers. Trade publishing still does far more good than harm to society, but the "book buzz" people who run Manhattan could all stop showing up to work and we'd be better off.
- mbg721 4y agoWhat makes the US a single market with 330M people and not a bunch of smaller markets? Is it just that somewhere like Europe has barriers to entry through language and differences in countries' regulation that don't come up in the US?
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoNational identity, culture and distribution. I can relate to a story set in places in the Deep South and Midwest, places I have barely been, because the author speaks to common motifs, assumptions and subtext. (This also lets them play with implication, something lost if one must be explicit about what may lost outside one’s culture.)
- spoonjim 4y agoThe White Anglosphere (UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) has a somewhat shared cultural identity.
- mbg721 4y agoThis reminded me of a tangential complaint: I (in the US) recently bought one of Richard Osman's books, and its setting is more English than actual England is. So why did the publisher insist on adjusting the spelling to "Labor Party"? It's a proper noun, and I'm going to pronounce it "lay-BOOOUUURRR" like I always do... you're not fooling anybody into thinking this took place in New Jersey. Did they think Americans would find the extra U offensive or confusing??
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]