So Many Books...So Little Time!

That old lament is more true today than ever before. Just under 300,000 books were published in the US last year, many of them as ebooks. Great Britain was second adding 206,000 more books, and the Chinese published another 136,000. Russia, Germany, Spain Italy, Japan, France… The list goes on until the combined worldwide total of all books published last year equaled 1,882,944.  A new book was published about every 16 seconds! This happens every year, with another two million books ramping up for publication in 2012, and these will drop onto the enormous pile of all previously published books. You realize that you could never even make a cursory review of the list of titles available in a lifetime, let alone read any significant portion of these books. And as a writer, you realize that your latest little polished gem of a book, just released, is now out there competing with over seven million titles currently on sale in the US at any given moment this year.
The ebook phenomenon has opened the floodgates of publication, as the former gatekeepers of the dam, the professional editors and traditional book publishers, have now been swept aside and a writer can now go directly to the reading public through Amazon, CreateSpace, Lightning Source, Lulu and any of a number of other POD printing services. As a writer you no longer need anyone's  approval or permission to get published--how empowering! Print On Demand publishing and the Internet changed the entire publishing business, particularly since the advent of Kindle. And yet, though it is easier for a writer to break into "print" (be it digital print or ink), the sheer volume of books competing for a relatively stable pool of readers attention now makes it more difficult than ever to get noticed and make any significant sales. In fact, I would say it is more challenging now to make any headway as a writer than it was in the bygone era where traditional publishers controlled the game.
Unwilling to admit that they have lost control, traditional publishers still hawk their best sellers, but POD books are now outselling most others, and ebooks swamp the market with their sheer volume. Unfortunately the average self-published book on places like Exlibris, iUniverse or Authorhouse, (all now owned by a single company, Author Solutions) sells fewer than 200 units in its lifetime. Last year iUniverse authors sold an average of 166 books, with 40% being purchased by the author or their immediate clan of family and friends. Clearly these companies are doing business under a high volume but low sales per author model.
I must be frank and number myself among the many services out there that assist authors in preparing their books for publication. Even knowing the enormous challenge they face for achieving anything approaching a wide readership, my philosophy is that 10 readers, 50 , a 100, 500, are better than none. Even if their sales will be modest, they can take pride in the effort they made to write and prepare their book as best they can. POD publishing was all about personal empowerment as achieved through the  current day "miracle" of the internet, the Gutenberg press of our electronic era. It's encouraging to see a web site like Project Gutenberg where you can find 38,000 free ebooks with authors like Hermann Melville hawking their goods. Call me Ishmael, but I wonder how many of the books currently finding their way between the dignity of two covers are going to be around a hundred years from now?
The challenge for the writer today, who must now do most or all of their own marketing, is how in the world do you get attention and make consistent sales? Visit writer's forums and they are all discussing how they can make their breakout as a writer and really get noticed. Some advise building an enormous web tribe to trumpet their books, others have determined to write a series of short 30,000 word novellas, make the first one "free" and then wait for the sales on the sequels. These books have been deliberately designed to be readable on a long plane trip, for example, a case of a supposed artist bending his or her craft to suit the contingencies of modern life.
Sigh… Thank God Keats and Shelly didn't have these things to worry about. Yet, on that note, Keats was helped early in his brief writing career when he was introduced to an editor of the Examiner, Leigh Hunt, who energetically advocated on his behalf and helped persuade a friend to publish Keats' first volume of poetry in 1817. It was this timely assistance from an editor that influenced Keats to continue his career as a poet, where he once lamented with Wordsworth, that no real poet of merit would be truly acknowledged and enjoy success in his lifetime. Two years later Keats wrote five of his most famous odes, and to this day we may contemplate the Grecian Urn with his thoughts in our minds.
Shelley's wife Mary (the author of her era's  "Frankenstein") tried to encourage him to write on topics that might find him a wider audience, and lamented that he wrote "without hope of appreciation" from many readers. She wrote: "I believed that he would obtain greater mastery over his own powers, and greater happiness in his mind, if public applause crowned his endeavors… Shelley did not expect sympathy and approbation from the public; but the want of it took away a portion of the ardor that ought to have sustained him while writing." God forbid that the travails of finding readers might have prevented either Keats or Shelley, perhaps two of the three greatest English poets, from plying their craft!
The list of great writers who never achieved popular or commercial success in their day is a long one. Some languished in alcohol, drowning their sorrows away, while other lived in relative poverty. Nothing they did was ever really valued in their lifetime. A long time fan of Tolkien's fantasy stories, I often wondered what old J.R.R. would have thought of the trilogy of blockbuster movies that achieved more commercial success than the author could have possibly imagined. Virtually redefining the entire fantasy genre, The Hobbit sold over 100 million copies, and the Lord of The Rings beat that with 150 million sales. Tolkien never knew it, and once noted that he was quite pleased with the proceeds he received from his writing, as it was "enough to buy a nice new couch." And did you know that the now famous poet e.e. cummings (who always typed his name in lower case) dedicated his first book of poetry, self-published I might add, to all the thirteen editors and publishers who had rejected it! Other great self-published authors include Howard Fast (Spartacus), Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way), T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas  Hardy, James Joyce and Alexandre Dumas, who all funded the publication of their own work, and thank god they did! Even old Ben Franklin wrote and self-published Poor Richard's Almanac under the pen name of Richard Saunders for 26 years.  
With a list like that it should be understood that this article is in no way a knock on self-publishing, which I now consider the new norm where books are concerned. Self-published titles represent the  majority of what is now published each year, but how does one find the Hemingways and Eliots in the  deluge, particularly when all Amazon continually displays, on each and every page when I do book searches, is "The Hunger Games?" How does one find the time to make any critical review of what is published each year? While I doubt if there is another Keats or Shelley out there in cyberland, I am certain many fine writers are going unnoticed, and despairing for want of appreciation.
Yet here is another truth about writing. Few real writers ever begin a novel with commercial success in mind. There are loads of hacks out there with a commercial formula—write 25,000 words on S&M  or Vampire erotica, offer it for $0.99 cents and let the hunger games begin! But real writers do not debase themselves this way. Like Shelley, they write because their mind overflows with thoughts, feelings, observations on life and the stories and poetry these things eventually become. Ever hear of House of Spirits by Isabel Allende, The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, Atonementby Ian McEwan, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Beloved by Toni Morrison? These are all authors considered in the top 10 for contemporary writers of the last 20 or 30 years. Yet you will not find any of their books on the Amazon top ten list.
A real writer starts with a good book, though let's face it, countless thousands have started with a fairly BAD book. I've looked at many top sellers and found them to be poorly written books, and in many cases pure drivel. But, quality in writing has not been the real touchstone of success for decades. Look at Amazon's current top sellers, and you will find "Fifty Shades of Gray" by a former British TV Executive E. L. James leading the charge. Not to pick on her, but read a few of the one (1) star reviews, a whopping 604 by last count out of a total 2261 reviews, representing that over 26% of all readers reviewing gave the book the lowest possible rating, some even wishing they could have rated it a zero (0)! Their comments are scathing, like: "the writing is about two levels worse than the worst Harlequin romance you've ever read." Another reviewer wrote: "This has to be the most appallingly atrocious writing I've ever seen in a major release." The negative reviewers seem baffled that anyone would consider the book good, yet 1,070 other reviews award 5 stars.
How is this possible? It happens for the same reason no-talent, wholly manufactured twerps like Justin Bieber are popular. Readers are a bell curve, with the lion's share at the median "C" level. I would like to suspect that the 600 plus negative reviews of "Fifty Shades of Gray" come from the top of the curve, the more intelligent and discerning readers. For those five star accolades the book received,  one has to wonder how many were written by friends and associates of the author's ex TV clan, her "tribe" of supporters, as these Amazon reviews are considered a necessary ingredient of any new author's marketing plan.
And the fact that these Amazon "reviews" carry so much weight at all is another oddity. There are boatloads readers out there who, quite frankly, cannot tell good from bad when it comes to prose, yet their opinions can make or break a writer from a commercial standpoint. Remember that we live in a society where our TV programming is all about surviving odd little wilderness games, dancing with stars, (or ice-skating with them), or the desperate struggles of people trying to become the next great pop star, the next American Idol, the next chef, the next fashion designer, the next millionaire, all under the stern judgment of so called experts in those areas. Our current "entertainment" is one massive talent show where viewer "votes" via iTunes downloads or calls to fatten Verizon, AT&T and Sprint make the thumbs up or down decision on would be performers. Yes, we make the decisions, like the spectators in the  coliseum shouting life or death to a fallen gladiator. Does this say anything about what the public considers "good?" In like manner, what the public selects out of the enormous annual book surge is also seldom anything that really has merit as good fiction. Even the Pulitzer Prize panel snootily turned up their noses at the hundreds of fiction books entered for consideration this year and refused to award a prize for the fiction category! That is indeed a damning condemnation of the quality of contemporary fiction, with or without the literary gatekeepers that have now been dethroned by POD publishing models.
Popularity has seldom been any real indicator of quality, but all that said, popularity is what will make a writer commercially successful faster than anything else. The bottom line today is that you don't have to be a very good writer at all to be commercially successful. You just have to be a good marketer, adept at "trending" on twitter, face booking, marshalling an on-line "tribe" of people and stacking up five star Amazon reviews from friends. You can even break into the Amazon best seller top 10 for a brief moment of fame by simply placing a mega order for your own books through their retail channel, and many writers have done this as a pure marketing ploy when their book launches. After all, they get 70% back immediately as a royalty, so they consider the other 30% nothing more than an advertising cost. If they had bought the books through their author account that would have received no more than a 75% author discount from the POD houses anyway. So now their real investment in the ploy is only about 5% of the retail cost of the book on Amazon, which often discounts from the list price of the book to even wipe out this loss.  On top of that, if they bought 100 books from Amazon, for example, they still have those copies to resell, so they make back that 5% in short order and actually come out ahead by buying their own books! 
Any writer who wanted to be "famous" could keep themselves on the Amazon top 100 list indefinitely if they had a little war chest to buy their own books. I know of one author who propelled herself into the number 4 spot on Amazon for a day by simply buying 20 of her own books one day! Of course this nonsense could be corrected by Amazon in a heartbeat by not counting author retail purchases as sales, but the so called "writer" could spoof this by simply using a new email and shipping address.
Is this what it takes to make it these days as a writer, a host of marketing tricks? If you are a writer looking for some magic marketing plan, think fast, because in the time you have taken to read this brief post another ten authors have just "launched" their latest book with wide eyed hope. They've blogged about it, put it on the web, issued press releases, twittered, plastered their Facebook wall, and god knows what else. They are out there just like E. L. James or Suzanne Collins, who piled up 1500 three star or less reviews (about 50% of all reviews) for her book "Mocking Jay", (over 400 gave it 1 star). These middling to poor reviews equaled all those who rated the book higher, but it didn't stop Collins from beating out Steven King in the Amazon rankings with 820 days in the top 100 compared to King's relatively anemic 63 days on that same list after his last book launch. Her book "The Hunger Games" is the slush pile's soup of the day success story. Yet one astute reader, just 17 years old and from the obvious target audience for this book wrote: "The characters and plot are one-dimensional. It was painfully predictable. Cliché. Boring. Immature. The sad thing is, I think teenagers like this book because it requires no thought--it has no sustenance by means of developed characters or intricate plot. If we want people my age to start reading, should we really settle for feeding them empty stories like this one?"
The answer to her plaintive question is obviously "yes." Like all the recent vampire thrillers, the really successful writers serve up drivel, and the public seems to love it because that's all they know, or all they are capable of measuring. I hate to quote a Hollywood movie to make a point, but it seems in keeping with the theme I have going here. I am reminded of that line from the movie American President, a quaint comedy starring Michael Douglas where a presidential aid pleads that the American people "want leadership. And in the absence of genuine leadership, they will listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They're so thirsty for it, they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand."
To this Douglas quickly returns: "We've had Presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don't drink the sand, because they're thirsty. They drink it because they don't know the difference." The ominous silence after that statement, and the look on the faces of the  bewildered White House staffers tells all. The public is a collective bunch of know nothing idiots. Was the remark a high-browed exercise in hubris, or was it more a scathing truth about American culture?
You be the judge. Vote with your attention as a reader. Vote with your dollars, just as you do for The  Voicewhen you make that call. Want more movies about young teens hunting each other down with bows and arrows? Buy Suzanne Collins and keep her in that Amazon top 100 list. Just start typing the name "Suzanne" on Google, for example, and watch what comes up before you even finish the word—soup du jour. Google has pronounced her the world's iconic Suzanne. It may be painful to swallow, but it is the reality of our time. I sit here wondering how long it will take for some other Suzanne to dethrone her on Google.
Unfortunately, for every astute and intelligent reader who makes thoughtful choices about their books, there will be ten idiots out there awarding five stars to claptrap, poppycock, hogwash, rubbish, drivel, twaddle, balderdash, nonsense, baloney, tripe, gibberish, bunkum, hooey, hokum and humbug! And of the top ten books on sale at Amazon, most would be best described that way.
I'd like to think that the success stories of the day will soon fall like autumn leaves, allowing really good writers to get more attention, but the problem is that the Hunger Games of today will be replaced by some other crap next year. You have to ask yourself what Steinbeck would have accomplished if he was releasing his novels for Kindle today.  Would he make the top ten? How would he even get noticed in the deluge? The "gray priesthood" of critics and reviewers, as he called them, has now been replaced by … well, by YOU. Anyone can throw those stars up on Amazon to make or break a writer.
But it's not all bleak. There is hope. Check on "the classics" and you will find lots of really great books still scoring high marks on Amazon. The current top 10 in Literature / Fiction / Classics: 1) Midnight Cowboy - ( James Leo Herlihy, 2) The End of the Affair - (Graham Greene), 3) The Hobbit - (J.R.R. Tolkien), 4) Atlas Shrugged - (Ayn Rand), 5) Lord of the Rings - (J.R.R. Tolkien), 6) 1984 - (George Orwell), 7) The Great Gatsby – (F. Scott Fitzgerald), 8) Jane Austen: The Complete Collection – (Jane Austen), 9) Lord of the Flies – (William Golding), and 10) A confederacy of Dunces – (John Kennedy Toole).
The fact that none of these will appear in the current Amazon top 10 should be obvious, because the  collective public is, indeed, a confederacy of dunces. Yet the fact that these books all still score relatively high, with authors that never heard of Facebook or Twitter,  is the glimmer of hope out there. And guess what. I'll bet they will still be scoring high in another fifty years, when the Hunger Games is long forgotten. So keep writing. The real writers will be found in time, even if it takes a hundred years. You may never know about the success future readers crown you with. That's the writer's lot in life at times, but how impoverished the world would be if poor sales had discouraged Keats and he never wrote those five great odes. You just have to believe that someday, someday, you'll break through the ranks and get the attention you deserve.
Oh… by the way…to Good luck with your next book launch!