A friend’s book is being
published this year, so I’ve been learning from her about all the work expected
of a debut author. It isn’t enough to have written the book. No, one must also
be active on social media, do blog tours, notify contacts, seek out
opportunities to do book talks, and I-forget-what-all-else.
But writers just want to
write! Most of us don’t want to do marketing. We’d rather spend the time holed
up in our cubbies with our laptops, lost in imaginary worlds, coming up with
new books.
The problem? Basically,
there are lots and lots of new books out there. There are lots and lots of
readers as well, but readers all want to read the “best” books, books that are
a guaranteed good read. Readers have easy access now to books from all over the
English-speaking world, so they can pick just the books that they’ve heard are
really good, and these tend to be the same books that other readers have also
heard are very good. So a small number of books get read by lots of readers, and the
rest of the new books (including some that are also very good) tend to go unread.
It’s a depressing
situation if one of those new books is yours. Thus the need to market your
book.
Shouldn’t the publisher
do the marketing? Certainly they want your book to sell. But whether they sell a
total umpteen copies of a wide variety of books or umpteen copies of the same
book, they’ll still make money. It might be more efficient for them to focus
their efforts on a few books, in that case. At any rate, that’s how it is. Unless
they’re expecting great things, they probably won’t do that much.
Is there any way around
this? The problem seems to be with our filtering system. There are several
levels to it. First, the author writes the book. Agents filter out a lot of the
books that are written, though some books are self-published and skip that
filter. Then publishers filter the books presented by agents, accepting only
some of them. Then the books go out into the world, where…
I think that’s where it
turns into a combination of luck and money. Luck in who happens to pick the
book up and how much influence they have with other readers. Money, because
people are more likely to pick up a book if they’ve heard of it or seen it, and
advertising can do that. Obviously the quality of the book also matters. If the
people who read it don’t like it, they won’t recommend it to others. But a good
book that never gets read won’t get recommended either.
So now I’m fantasizing
about a system where new books enter a database and are assigned to readers to
evaluate. Every book gets a chance, regardless of its author’s ability to generate
interest on Twitter or lack thereof. Readers aren’t deluged with attempts to
pique their interest, attempts that lead to their becoming more and more
overwhelmed by the demands on their attention, and their having less and less
time to actually read books.
The problem with this
idea is that readers want to choose
their books, not be assigned them as though they were in school. Some might
volunteer to be assigned books, hoping for a serendipitous discovery, but more
likely they’d rather browse the shelves and try only books that look appealing
to them.
So that’s not promising. Well,
who has the most reason to want such a system to work? Probably the writers
themselves. So instead of assigning new books to random readers, assign them to
other authors. Maybe their book gets as many reads as the number of others’
books they are willing to be assigned. This would provide a preliminary filter
and ensure that at least a few people sample their books—and maybe go on to
recommend them to friends.
Some further rules would
be necessary. First, no reciprocal reading. If I am an author and I want
fifteen people to read my book, I do not get assigned books by any of the
fifteen who are reading mine. Nor do I get assigned any books by people I know.
There can’t be any pressure to like the book.
Second, these aren’t book
reviews. The only thing the reader has to do is respond, “I like it and would
probably read another book like this,” or “I don’t like it and wouldn’t choose
to read a book like this.” No discussion of merits, no details, no reasons why.
Third, given that people
occasionally cheat (shock! gasp!), there would probably need to be some factual
question that the reader has to answer to prove that they actually read the
book. The author of the book could provide one. Otherwise, unscrupulous people
could get their books read without reading anyone else’s in return.
Fourth, complete
confidentiality. You don’t want to meet another author and have them know that you
didn’t like their book—or the other way around. Too awkward. Again, there can’t
be any pressure to like the book.
Given that there is
nothing new under the sun, and especially no new ideas that aren’t already on
the internet, there is probably something wrong with this imaginary system.
Maybe it wouldn’t be of any use, or maybe not enough authors would participate,
or maybe people would try to game the system by reading lots of competing books
and saying they dislike all of them, in the hope of making their own book look
better.
Or maybe it would work and is already in use
somewhere on the web. There are lots of book-related organizations out there
that I don’t know about, and maybe there are genre-specific groups that do
this. If so, I hope I find out some day.
I hope I have reason to.
Till next post.
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