Common wisdom?

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Common wisdom?

by Christine Kling

The issue of whether or not to include a prologue in books came up this week on an email list I am on, and when I should have been working on my new novel, instead I was off searching for evidence to support a theory of mine — that the world of authors and publishing is rife with rumors and urban legends that get passed off as common wisdom.

But let me back up a little here. Let’s start with what is supposedly the “common wisdom” about starting off your novel with a prologue.

-agents reject them

-editors loathe them

-readers skip them

I cannot tell you how often I have read all of the above on various discussion loops throughout the last ten years. Yes, I know there are individual editors and agents who have stated they hate prologues. So what? Some hate science fiction or romance or literary fiction, too. And yes, there are readers who skip them. That’s their loss. Yet people keep repeating this assertion that all writers should avoid prologues or simply rename them chapter one. So I set out to scour the Internet in an effort to find some real data to back up these assertions. And you know what I found? Nada, zilch, bupkis.

Writers are making these assertions based on anecdotal evidence. In other words, you know four people who all say they hate prologues and they never read them. Based on that, you – Nervous Nelly New Author – decide never to include one in your book. In that case you’ve just made both an artistic and a business decision based on a lousy assumption.

I don’t think most people who make these statements about what common wisdom in publishing have really comprehended the depth of the market for books in general. In the old days of print-only publishing that was understandable because we saw lots of bookstores, but for the most part, they all carried the same books. Is spite of the fact that we knew there were bestsellers, publishing seemed like a pretty small world.

Today, digital books and the ability to put them on e-readers, phones, tablets and computers has made it possible for anyone to carry a bookstore in his or her pocket.

In their latest product announcement, Apple announced that over 600 million iOS devices have been sold.

According to an article on All Things Digital Morgan Stanley estimated that “Amazon will sell $4.5 billion worth of Kindle e-readers and tablets this year, up 26 percent from 2012.” This is the best estimate available to guestimate the number of Kindle devices around since Amazon won’t release those figures. I reckon that is at least 20 million Kindle devices in 2013 alone.

And then there are Nook and Kobo devices out there, as well as millions of Android tablets and phones.

This Wikipedia page has some fascinating lists of the bestselling books of all time. The bestselling single title is Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and it’s taken more than 150 years to sell 200 million copies – and that is only the equivalent of a third of the iOS devices around today. (I found it oddly reassuring to note that the Fifty Shades series has not sold nearly as many copies as the Perry Mason series).

Back to my original point about prologues. I wanted to find a list of well-known books that had succeeded in spite of their prologues. I couldn’t find one anywhere on the Internet, so I made my own. Here is my list of some best sellers that included prologues:

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris

Labyrinthe by Kate Mosse

The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason

Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard