I’m going to answer some (book) burning questions in today’s post, because I really want to talk about these things. The newswires are full of stories about the Death Of Books, and as Harry Potter draws ever nearer to its end, I’m betting we’ll see more coverage about the dire straits of the publishing world. Of course, these answers are just coming from me–an avid reader, author and former marketing brand manager. I’ve only ever worked on the fringes of Publishing, so I don’t know that I’m anything close to an expert. But boy, do I have opinions! Buckle up…
Why don’t people read for fun anymore?
I think there will always be readers, just as there will always be surfers, motorcycle enthusiasts and folks who collect dolls. Each one of these hobbies has enjoyed a rennaissance of faddishness at one time or another, but has then settled back down into a more realistic following. Leisure reading is a hobby about which many people can be very passionate, and other people can be occasional dabblers. For every book freak like me I’m betting there are a dozen folks who limit their leisure reading to a couple of paperbacks on the beach in summer and an occasional book throughout the year.
A few years ago I was in a bookstore with some friends. One of them came up to me and asked–very earnestly–how I knew which books were good and which ones I would enjoy. He had NO IDEA how to shop for a book. So he never went book shopping, until that day I dragged him into Barnes & Noble. It got me to thinking, because they were very good questions. I’m an avid reader. It’s gotten to the point that I can tell pretty closely whether or not I’ll like a book.
- Did I like the author’s previous work(s)?
- Do I like other things from this publisher/publisher’s imprint?
- Is this in a genre or vein which has appealed to me in the past?
- Are both the opening paragraph and a random paragraph from the middle appealing to me?
- Does the back cover blurb sound intriguing?
Yeah, those things help me, but how do we make book-shopping more pleasurable for the more casual reader? Some ideas:
Clearly identify genres in shelf and table displays.
Different casual readers enjoy different things. Some prefer mysteries while others groove on books where floridly-named women have sex with vampires. (Go figure.) It’s got to be very frustrating to face an unlabled book display with sixty or seventy titles–none of which are clearly labeled as to genre. It’d be like walking into the frozen food section, seeing a bunch of boxes labeled “Ice Cream” and having to then open each one to decide what flavour is inside.
Do A Better Job of Cross-Marketing
What little cross-promotion currently exists is good, but is mostly limited to displays of authors’ backlists. The newest Patricia Cornwell will be on an endcap, surrounded by several older Patricia Cornwell books. Barnes & Noble and BAM have been doing a few genre-endcaps (“New In MYSTERY!”) but that’s still very limited and doesn’t do anything to burst out any center-shelf titles. How about a database of “if you like this [book/movie/tv show/style of music] you might enjoy X book by X author”? Affinity sorts work very well for most cross-promotion. As people have become more comfortable with computers and databases have evolved, this type of thing should find a home in brick and mortar bookstores. It does work to Amazon’s advantage–at least in my case.
Embrace Genre Fiction
It’s what people will buy. It’s what people enjoy. I think it’s dirty pool to complain about people not reading for fun and then refuse to publish the types of books which people think are fun.
Kill The Oprah Book Club
Yes, I know it blows out a dozen or so books a year. If you’re one of the Oprah Book Club picks, you’ve got it made. (Unless you lied about being an addict.) But, frankly, if we’re trying to encourage people to read for fun, the books Oprah chooses are NOT going to win many people over to long-time leisure reading. They.are.de.press.ing.
Create More Serialised Fiction
The books that tend to be the best in sales are the ones which have recurring characters who develop over time. People develop an affinity for the characters and spend money to find out if Charles and Mallory ever get together, if Peter and Rina Decker successfully remodel their kitchen and if Harry lives or dies. Dickens was the master of serialised fiction, and every bibliophile knows the story of the folks waiting on the docks for last installment of The Old Curiosity Shop to find out the fate of Little Nell. The two genres which traditionally have been best at exploiting the serialisation format in recent years are Science Fiction and Christian Fiction. Guess which genres are doing the best in terms of sales? Of course, I still have major issues with the way Christian Fiction Publishers are bursting their serialised material. They’re putting the least amount of story in the largest possible font and large trade paperback format; marketing a $3 minibook as a $15.95 Serial Novel. A happy medium would be nice.
I think elitism and failure to understand the casual reader are the twin enemies of modern book sales. I’m not a genre snob, but I’ll freely admit that I don’t ‘get’ people who aren’t avid readers. Sometimes in my mind it’s still recess and I’m the dorky kid with the Nancy Drew on the front porch and the non-readers are the ones trying to knock off my glasses with the kickball. But really, if the kickball kids can be convinced to part with a few ducats in exchange for the written word, I will feel quite vindicated indeed.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
There was a time when I devoured everything ever written by Terry Brooks, Micheal Moorcock, and other “fantasy” writers. And of course, I’ve read LOTR literally over a hundred times. I can quote a lot of it from memory.
Why did I stop? I don’t know. There’s a stigma, reading that kind of fiction, you know. I’m sure that played into it.
And after a while, it seemed like all the authors in the genre were copying each other. I don’t care for Moorcock’s dark psuedo-antireligion, but at least it’s different.
Then there’s this: being a busy beaver, my time for reading is at bedtime. I try to use that time reading scripture and meditating. Years ago, when I got serious about my faith, scripture reading kind of squeezed out fiction. I need to find another quiet time during the day, and then maybe I’ll have time for other types of reading.
Finally: I’m a real sucker for non-fiction. Especially history. Really especially baseball history. If I have a choice between a novel and a book about Christy Mathewson, my first choice would be the latter.
I think I’m pretty typical. I don’t have a problem with fiction per se, but it’s just not at the top of the list.
I wish stores would group serials together in chronological order. I know that’s a long shot, but it’s hell trying to dig out the Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone books from underneath the million Spenser novels. There’s no telling how many hours I’ve spent sitting on the floor of B&N comparing copyright dates to figure out the order in which to read my new favorite author’s books.
I’m glad I have some book nerd company out here. I’m fiction all the way, though. I hope we can still be friends.
[…] of bad covers, Coble’s got some brilliant publishing industry […]
New leisure readers should be pointed to their local libraries! Free books!
Most folks that are new to leisure reading don’t know that Nashville Public and many other public libraries have a GREAT service called Readers Advisory. They can recommend books to the reader’s taste. There are also several great websites that do the same thing. You enter the name of a book you like, and these sites will suggest similar titles and authors. I use these quite a bit, when I find a new book or author that I like. Try these out:
http://www.fictionconnection.com
Google: go to google and type in “If you like [author’s name] try…”
http://www.overbooked.org
Excellent. Thank you, Ms. C.
New leisure readers should be pointed to their local libraries! Free books!
Cheryl, I do point people to the library as often as I can. But I don’t do that exclusively.
–Libraries can be intimidating to newbies (no journals, cute bookmarks and Yanni CDs for sale to ease them in)
–The new leisure readers I’ve met aren’t comfortable talking with a human being about what to read because they don’t want to appear unsophisticated.
I will admit to my biggest shame, though. Lately I’ve been going to bookstores with a pen and paper in my purse. I peruse all the bright, shiny displays and write down what looks good.
I then go home and reserve the books at the library.
There are also several great websites that do the same thing.
Exactly. And those are great for die-hard bookheads like us. And great for dotcom bookstores.
But if you put a few computers scattered around a brick and mortar bookstore, just imagine how that would improve sales. People could come in, look a book up on their in the stores’ affinity databases and leave after making a purchase.
I’ve never understood why the bookstores DON’T do this. I remember how many records I bought after looking up the artist or title in those giant books record stores used to have sitting around.
I wish stores would group serials together in chronological order.
Or even if publishers would just put the numerical order of the serial somewhere on the book. I understand they are afraid a new reader won’t buy the newest book if it has “Book 3” on the cover. But come on. Harry Potter did it [Year 5 At Hogwarts] to no ill effects.
If they are too shy about putting the numbers on the cover, at least put them in the frontispiece.
I, like you, can’t count the number of times I’ve had to sort by copyright date. I also can’t count (okay, maybe “three”) the number of times my sister has called me LONG DISTANCE from a bookstore to ask me to confirm the correct order of a book series. The last one was with Elizabeth George.
I’m fiction all the way, though
I’m mostly fiction. I’ll do a non-fiction occasionally, but not often.
There’s a stigma, reading that kind of fiction, you know.
Oh, I know. Believe me, I know. And while I think it’s cute that people think they are better than other people because of the books they read, if you’re in business to sell something it’s best not to ridicule your buyers. Whatever.
I need to find another quiet time during the day, and then maybe I’ll have time for other types of reading.
I don’t have a set time of day for Bible Study. Sometimes I’ll do it in the morning, other times late at night. I sort of go with “as the spirit moves” on that.
I have such big thoughts about this. Wow. What a great post!. First, I want to just defer to Kathleen Fitzpatrick and second her notion that certain people have a great stake in promoting the “death of the novel.” We’re in a weird state where Barnes & Noble’s and Borders are still being built in every community larger than 100,000 people at the same time that publishers are complaining about sales. Those two things don’t quite add up. As someone who’s got a stake in one of those communities and access to information that leads me to believe that there was a boom time in book sales that is, for the most part, over now, I have to be honest and say that I don’t know what to make of the fact that new Barnes & Noble’s and Borders keep popping up. It makes me suspicious that people aren’t buying a lot of new books, but do buy a lot of books that are proven.
Second, I love, love, love the idea of someone putting together some kind of tie-in thingy where it would say “If you love, say, House, check out this book of rare medical conditions.” I don’t know who would do that, though. Certainly the big publishers, who are part of bigger media conglomerates could do that fairly easily with stuff under their control.
Maybe this is something the wholesalers would be in a good position to do. I don’t know but it intrigues me.
I thought everyone did this.
I’m gonna point out one real-world problem with your proposals, though, that also adress the death-of-the-novel/B&N-is-booming conundrum that B brings up. And that is that it asks publishers to go for profits by maximizing the sale of a single title (or concentrating on the titles/series in a single genre that will be the biggest sellers) rather than by selling a lesser quantity of a lot of books. It is, in fact, asking that publishing adopt the all-or-nothing approach that the rest of US business and US society has already adopted. (This has already happened in publishing, of course; they’re just working out the details of how to make the biggest sellers even bigger.) If you like to read the books on the ‘all’ side of the equation, you’re fine. But if you like to read books that aren’t genre material, you find that what you like has been relegated to ‘nothing.’ You can’t find the books you like in the bookstores, and they’re harder to find in the libraries, and publishers who once would publish a novel that was going to sell only a few thousand copies, or a non-fiction book that was going to sell in the high hundreds, well, they can’t get the return on them that they can get on the latest Star Trek novelization, so they stop publishing them. So the stores where you can get every book in some series flourish, but the stand-alone novel has a harder time getting out there.
I read a lot of books that fit the genre fiction category, but I read a lot that don’t. And I know which I find at Davis-Kidd, and which I have to hunt through the used book stores for.
Well, I guess we know I’m going to be spending long hours reading the Kathleen Fitzpatrick website. Wow. Interesting stuff, from what I’ve skimmed thus far.
We’re in a weird state where Barnes & Noble’s and Borders are still being built in every community larger than 100,000 people at the same time that publishers are complaining about sales.
I don’t know if KF addresses this, but I think part of the problem is that publishers are complaining about book sales in part because B&N/Borders/BAM have been gouging increasingly high amounts of marketing dollars from the publishers. Most people don’t realise that every time you see a book in a face-out display at one of the Mega-chains, it has cost the publisher anywhere from several hundred thousand to several million dollars to get that book such placement.
I think the publishers complain about the sales in part to say “…so don’t charge our marketing departments so much because it doesn’t work anyway.”
As to the market saturation by the big-box book retailers, I think they’ve successfully leveraged their non-literary floorspace (Journals, music, scrapbooking supplies, calenders, boargames), marketing incentives and remaindering deals into profits for them, struggles for publishers.
It makes me suspicious that people aren’t buying a lot of new books, but do buy a lot of books that are proven.
Exactly. Either “proven” through word of mouth or marketing pitches. The worst example is Books A Million (full disclosure, I used to work for their parent company.) That store has made a lot of money on churning and burning frontlist and near-frontlist. I hate to go in there unless I want an author’s most recent work. The BAM policy is to not carry backlist for 95% of its authors. The other BAM policy is, ironically, to have at least 45% floorspace for non-book retailing. However I guess “Book-related Crap A Million” is a less catchy name.
Second, I love, love, love the idea of someone putting together some kind of tie-in thingy where it would say “If you love, say, House, check out this book of rare medical conditions.”
Yes! That’s what I’m talking about. “If you like Jericho, check out these dystopian novels and alternate histories.” Such cross-marketing goes well beyond “If you like Patricia Cornwell, try Jonathan Kellerman”.
It seems like an expensive outlay, but it’d pay for itself inside a year, I’m betting.
The problem I’ve always had with those “If you like X then you’ll probably like Y” things is that they always seem to be either to broad or to narrow.
Take for instance Aunt B. comment: “If you love, say, House, check out this book of rare medical conditions.” That’s way too narrow. I love House, but a book about rare medical conditions wouldn’t interest me at all. The enjoyment I get from House has far more to do with the inter- and intrapersonal situations that develop among and between the characters than the actual medical conditions they are treating. Still another person may enjoy the “whodunit” mystery aspect which House has. Too often, the algorithms used to suggest one product based on enjoyment of another, focus on the wrong common aspect between the two for the specific person who happens to be viewing the suggestion.
The answer to that is to go the other direction and list all the products X that have anything in common with product Y. The problem with that approach is that it nearly voids the entire purpose of the system in the first place. Blockbuster Total Access has that problem. If you rate even just a couple of movies on their system it will spit back out over 100 suggestions of movies you might like. While it’s arguable that narrowing down my search to 100 movies from the thousands out there may be a significant accomplishment, it’s still a little too overwhelming to be very useful to me.
I sometimes get frustrated with Netflix because they will turn me towards Five Fingers Of Death (terrible) because I gave Seven Samurai (wonderful & martial) 5 stars & A Taxing Woman (wonderful & non-martial) 4 stars. I like Beckett; I don’t like Pinter. Just because they are both playwrights with pauses & paucities doesn’t at all mean they are equally interesting or enjoyable. I like Into Thin Air not just because I climb, but also & perhaps more importantly because Krakauer can flat out write; don’t send me Bass’s Seven Summits.
I don’t know if we’ll ever have the computer fu that can separate out the nuances of what makes The Cantos of Ezra Pound very much like George Gilder’s Microcosm. Odds are we will always mostly depend on friends, luck, & the few remaininig cunning booksellers (like Roger Bishop of Davis-Kidd) and librarians (like Bill Hook of Vanderbilt Divinity), who can find what book you want just as you begin to start wanting it, to satisfy any yen for some kind of parallelism.
Heh. Don’t get me started on the co-worker who used to try to lend me her Star Trek novels because I read Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, and Joe Haldeman, or the one who kept telling me that I had to like Trollope because I like Austen.
Oops–PS. Jagadiah, at least the latest Jesse Stone novel (High Profile) lists in descending order all the Spensers, Jesses, & Sunnys just before the title page.
Do you think a love from reading is in ANY way genetic?? My whole family are readers … parents, brother, grandparents on both sides; pretty much everyone. Then I have friends who .. no one in their family reads. I, like you, find this bizarre!! I find myself thinking … Why don’t you want to read? What’s the issue here? Because … reading … is a fundamental part of my life.
I love the public library … I have the art of going online and selecting books, picking them up two days later down to a science. (becuase I don’t really like libraries themselves that much! The online catalog is awesome … they need to work on their search though …. )
And … finally … I second the motion to end Oprah’s book club – for the same reasons you stated. She states the book club is to encourage a love of reading … and yet she doesn’t really choose books that would cause ANYONE to love reading. perhaps The books cause people to THINK. (Yes, think …and be depressed!). She should be encouraging people to form their own book clubs … I swap books all the time with a group at church – which is great – a source of recommendations;
And on that note … back to *forever odd* 😉
Why does a book that makes you think make you depressed? I don’t want to read anything that doesn’t make me think. Maybe it just makes me think about what life would be like if I lived in a slightly different universe or at a different time or place, or about who murdered whom, or if I had this or that adversity to overcome, but there’s nothing inherently depressing about any of that.
Heh. I know Lacy fairly well offline. I don’t think she meant it that way.
I believe what she was trying to say was that the OBC books do have some value in that they make you think–but the subject matter and the way in which it is handled is invariably depressing.
There are books that depress me.
There are books that make me think.
There are books that make me happy.
I always prefer books that make me think. If they make me think AND depress me (Sophie’s Choice) I don’t enjoy the experience as much as a book that just makes me think (Devil & The White City) or makes me think & makes me happy (A Prayer For Owen Meany). Books that just depress me (She’s Come Undone) are foul, in my opinion.
Books that just make me happy (Goodnight Moon) are fun from time to time just because…even though I don’t care to spend too much time on them.
See, for me, even a book like Sophie’s Choice can be exhiliarating because of the things it makes me think about. It might have made some mental connections for me that I wouldn’t have made on my own (the Southern/Polish similarities, for instance), or shown me an intriguing way to use a style or structure to provoke a particular reaction in the reader, or whatever. And that tickles me (to quote B). But then I read Henry James for pleasure, so I have to admit to being wierd that way.
See, for me, even a book like Sophie’s Choice can be exhiliarating because of the things it makes me think about.
I may read differently from other people, and I know I read fiction differently than non-fiction.
Fiction is, for me, a very immersive experience. I feel very keenly the mood of a place when I read most books. (That’s one of the the things that makes it easy for me to re-read books I enjoy.)
I do pick up on an author’s mood a lot of times, and that makes certain books difficult to read. When I read Sophie’s Choice, I remember feeling OPPRESSIVELY depressed by it. Not just the “Oh, isn’t that concentration camp stuff sad?” business, but the atmosphere of the book.
Years later I read an article about Styron’s depression and being not at all surprised. I know he claims that his worst depressive episode began in 1985, a few years after writing SC, but to me his depressiveness leached into that work painfully.
And I can read all the piles of non-fiction in the world about depression, concentration camps and men who collect jazz records without being phased one iota. Non-fiction allows me a degree of detachment I can’t find when I read fiction.
Ah. I’m generally a style-first reader, not a mood-first one. I can also switch over to a plot-first mode of reading, for mysteries, adventures, or the works of Henry Fielding. But even though I recognize and usually identify with the moods I’m reading about, I’m always getting off on the writing at the same time. Or being pissed off at how bad it is and putting the book down, of course. Same as watching TV. The Wire is profoundly depressing, but the respect given to the subject is not. Unless they kill off Bubbles, in which case it will be too depressing even for me.
So I know I’m joining this party late, but I couldn’t resist. One of the hardships in my life (yes, I have a great life, but still!) is going to the library without a plan and just having to pick books off the shelf and hope for the best. I used to have a bad habit of inhaling EVERYTHING an author has written if I read one book I liked. However, reading 6 books by the same author in two weeks generally ends badly– after a while you just know what’s going to happen, and the author starts to bug you. But I also hate unexpectedly stumbling on a graphic sex scene when reading– maybe I am repressed, but if I’m honest, sex is just not a spectator sport for me, and I can do without it in books as well. It makes me wish a little bit for a rating system for books (R for violence and graphic sex!) I tried Oprah’s book club backlist once, even though I never watch Oprah– I read one book and liked it, but then I read The House of Sand and Fog and wanted to slit my wrists. I have friends who believe that there’s beauty in the kind of sadness depicted in HoSF, but I hated it. I get very immersed in the books I read, and I figure there’s too much to be sad about in real life, and I hate crying about imaginary people in imaginary situations. I have been reading mysteries more and more (mostly to avoid sex, rape, incest, and other super disturbing situations), but I would love it if you would post your favorite books– I always need more recommendations.