A world for both formula fans and eclectic readers
I’ve been reveling as a reader in the world of ePublishing. Not only is there an infinite array of books, as I’ve mentioned before in previous postings, but there’s room for the eclectic, the esoteric, as well as the offbeat. Even so, a few things confuse and occasionally frustrate me.
I understand why formulaic writing and editing were important when the cost of printing was so high. It made sense to find the right combination of character interactions and to move the plot in just the right way to appeal to the desires of the greatest number of buyers among the reading public. Those readers were happy, the authors were happy, the publishers were happy, and the bookstores were too. When I’m in the mood for a Tony Hillerman or Iain Pears kind of mystery, I’m happy too. The real world might be chaotic and unpredictable, but finding that particular familiar place to hide in for awhile is a good thing.
And yet, I’m more than a person who needs a hiding place. Or maybe I’m a person who needs a lot of different places to hide in, depending upon my mood. But in reading a number of essays, blogs, and helpful hints for new writers, I sometimes feel like readers are still being patted on the head and told to sit quietly while we’re told what we like.
Even sites that acknowledge that pleasing the reader is more essential than pleasing a marketer or distribution company have told me that the way I choose what to read and how I read is, well, wrong. Or perhaps it’s just contrary to well-known formulas. In order to dissolve into my demographic test tube I should:
- Be dazzled and lured in by a thumbnail picture
- Stay true to a genre and don’t read from a variety of them
- Gasp and hide under the couch if a book has more than a modest word count
- Avoid books that don’t have any reviews to reduce my fear of the unknown
- Have no other senses but visual, and therefore only read in the traditional manner without doing anything else
I have trouble with the formula. I end up an insoluble sediment at the bottom. I’ve always been suspicious of covers, from the earliest days of holding books in my hands. I discovered early on that whoever designed them had probably not read more than a few pages. They might have interesting designs that danced around in front of me but they told me nothing about the book to help decide whether to buy it. The blurbs by reviewers and celebrity authors seemed too general and hyperbolic to be helpful, and I was not terribly surprised to learn that many who wrote them were paid to do so without having read any of the book they were extolling. To me, covers were like commercials or ads in general: designed to distract and sell me something and best ignored.
Instead, I would open the books at random points throughout and read a few pages at each. I would check the “About the Author” section, particularly for nonfiction works, along with acknowledgements and endnotes. That gave me a better indication of whether I thought I might like the book. If it suited my mood or my interests, I took a chance, and often discovered a new genre, learned something new, and added a new author to my lists of favorites. If I ended up not liking it, I blamed no one but myself.
With epublishing, I have a lot more information available. Because those publishing independently often write the book’s description blurb, I can rely on the person who presumably knows best what it’s about to tell me its main features. I can read a significant percentage in preview to see if I like the style (though sadly, many offer only a wee bit at the beginning, with much of it wasted on title page and table of contents). On many sites, particularly goodreads, I can see the books that the writer reads, and any blogs and essays that might give me more of a glimpse of context or perspective. And yes, I can see reviews, as well as posts and comments that the author makes to other people. All that is valuable information, and more likely to sway my choices than the thumbnail marketing image.
I was surprised to read on a much quoted writers blog advocating concern for the reader – and one I agreed with in general – that anyone who said that a marketing image didn’t matter in a reader’s selection decision was wrong. Humans are visually-oriented, we’re told firmly, so I suppose that those of us who may be more verbally than spatially oriented don’t exist. I don’t remember the color of the shirt I’m wearing half the time and can’t always identify faces, even of family members unless they’re up close or speaking, but apparently a little picture that is literally the size of my thumb dictates my choices. The person’s heart was in the right place, of course, and I suppose not everyone has read Oliver Sacks. Perhaps the blogger doesn’t know anyone with atypical sensory processing, or perhaps she knows those who are more image biased. But I suspect that those who are word rather than image oriented are more likely to be over-represented among readers than in the general population. This is not to say we are the majority of readers. We’re obviously not. But we exist and saying that we don’t serves no purpose. You don’t have to make a formula for us. Just don’t pour us down the drain if we don’t fit into the beaker.
I know someone who had trouble with reading comprehension for years until he discovered – quite by accident – that if he listened to an audio version of a book while he read it, he was able to process, absorb, retain, and enjoy it as well as anyone else. The attention deficit diagnosis was put aside and he’s become an avid and voracious reader. Again, most of us are visually dominant, but for those who aren’t, the wide availability of audio selections is a godsend. And even if they are a thin minority of readers, they are readers anyway and surely the possibilities of epublishing have something to offer them too.
Even those who are good visual readers rely on audio books when running, doing the laundry, driving, or any number of other things. I saw a posting recently by an author asking about audio publication possibilities. Unlike other topics with scores of helpful responses, this one stayed lonely for a while. Are there many indie writers going that route, or is it cost prohibitive?
And finally, the publishing conventional wisdom that is most misapplied, cookie-cutter fashion, to the epublishing world is that no reader wants to read anything over a particular length. Again, I will admit that I’m probably in the minority, but I’m fond of a nice long read. I’m open-minded enough to read the short, the quirky and quick on occasion, but generally I like something long and literary. I want the plots to build properly and not take shortcuts to relieve an editor’s fear that my attention span is crippled. I want the characters to be well developed and to evolve. I understand, writers of the world, if you feel the need to keep sentences and book lengths short. But as a nod to those of us readers who think bleak winters are made bearable by warm blankets and big books, could you occasionally offer a compilation of your series rather than making us buy short snippets separately? Our ereaders can hold a lot. And if a plot drags down in the middle, it’s very easy for us to skip pages at the flick of our fingers. It doesn’t waste any trees and we can always return to what we jumped over if we find we missed something plot-valuable. Editing for content is good if the story isn’t sacrificed; but editing to force something to a certain length ought to be a quaint old custom that is happily behind us.
My point in this post is not to take away anyone’s romance, or zombies, or mysteries, or vampires, or young adult forced by a heartless world to battle peers to the death. It’s not to denounce interesting and effective marketing images or to insist that everyone write sweeping epics that would make Tolstoy tremble. All those things work because they provide what many readers want. But this wonderful brave new world of publishing gives new voices and opportunities to readers, just as it does to writers. There is room for the niche book that makes a significant impact on only ten readers as much as there is for the one that appeals to ten thousand. But each of those readers is as valuable as the other. As readers find their voices, it becomes apparent that there are multi-part harmonies in their chorus. That makes the world very beautiful indeed.
I understand why formulaic writing and editing were important when the cost of printing was so high. It made sense to find the right combination of character interactions and to move the plot in just the right way to appeal to the desires of the greatest number of buyers among the reading public. Those readers were happy, the authors were happy, the publishers were happy, and the bookstores were too. When I’m in the mood for a Tony Hillerman or Iain Pears kind of mystery, I’m happy too. The real world might be chaotic and unpredictable, but finding that particular familiar place to hide in for awhile is a good thing.
And yet, I’m more than a person who needs a hiding place. Or maybe I’m a person who needs a lot of different places to hide in, depending upon my mood. But in reading a number of essays, blogs, and helpful hints for new writers, I sometimes feel like readers are still being patted on the head and told to sit quietly while we’re told what we like.
Even sites that acknowledge that pleasing the reader is more essential than pleasing a marketer or distribution company have told me that the way I choose what to read and how I read is, well, wrong. Or perhaps it’s just contrary to well-known formulas. In order to dissolve into my demographic test tube I should:
- Be dazzled and lured in by a thumbnail picture
- Stay true to a genre and don’t read from a variety of them
- Gasp and hide under the couch if a book has more than a modest word count
- Avoid books that don’t have any reviews to reduce my fear of the unknown
- Have no other senses but visual, and therefore only read in the traditional manner without doing anything else
I have trouble with the formula. I end up an insoluble sediment at the bottom. I’ve always been suspicious of covers, from the earliest days of holding books in my hands. I discovered early on that whoever designed them had probably not read more than a few pages. They might have interesting designs that danced around in front of me but they told me nothing about the book to help decide whether to buy it. The blurbs by reviewers and celebrity authors seemed too general and hyperbolic to be helpful, and I was not terribly surprised to learn that many who wrote them were paid to do so without having read any of the book they were extolling. To me, covers were like commercials or ads in general: designed to distract and sell me something and best ignored.
Instead, I would open the books at random points throughout and read a few pages at each. I would check the “About the Author” section, particularly for nonfiction works, along with acknowledgements and endnotes. That gave me a better indication of whether I thought I might like the book. If it suited my mood or my interests, I took a chance, and often discovered a new genre, learned something new, and added a new author to my lists of favorites. If I ended up not liking it, I blamed no one but myself.
With epublishing, I have a lot more information available. Because those publishing independently often write the book’s description blurb, I can rely on the person who presumably knows best what it’s about to tell me its main features. I can read a significant percentage in preview to see if I like the style (though sadly, many offer only a wee bit at the beginning, with much of it wasted on title page and table of contents). On many sites, particularly goodreads, I can see the books that the writer reads, and any blogs and essays that might give me more of a glimpse of context or perspective. And yes, I can see reviews, as well as posts and comments that the author makes to other people. All that is valuable information, and more likely to sway my choices than the thumbnail marketing image.
I was surprised to read on a much quoted writers blog advocating concern for the reader – and one I agreed with in general – that anyone who said that a marketing image didn’t matter in a reader’s selection decision was wrong. Humans are visually-oriented, we’re told firmly, so I suppose that those of us who may be more verbally than spatially oriented don’t exist. I don’t remember the color of the shirt I’m wearing half the time and can’t always identify faces, even of family members unless they’re up close or speaking, but apparently a little picture that is literally the size of my thumb dictates my choices. The person’s heart was in the right place, of course, and I suppose not everyone has read Oliver Sacks. Perhaps the blogger doesn’t know anyone with atypical sensory processing, or perhaps she knows those who are more image biased. But I suspect that those who are word rather than image oriented are more likely to be over-represented among readers than in the general population. This is not to say we are the majority of readers. We’re obviously not. But we exist and saying that we don’t serves no purpose. You don’t have to make a formula for us. Just don’t pour us down the drain if we don’t fit into the beaker.
I know someone who had trouble with reading comprehension for years until he discovered – quite by accident – that if he listened to an audio version of a book while he read it, he was able to process, absorb, retain, and enjoy it as well as anyone else. The attention deficit diagnosis was put aside and he’s become an avid and voracious reader. Again, most of us are visually dominant, but for those who aren’t, the wide availability of audio selections is a godsend. And even if they are a thin minority of readers, they are readers anyway and surely the possibilities of epublishing have something to offer them too.
Even those who are good visual readers rely on audio books when running, doing the laundry, driving, or any number of other things. I saw a posting recently by an author asking about audio publication possibilities. Unlike other topics with scores of helpful responses, this one stayed lonely for a while. Are there many indie writers going that route, or is it cost prohibitive?
And finally, the publishing conventional wisdom that is most misapplied, cookie-cutter fashion, to the epublishing world is that no reader wants to read anything over a particular length. Again, I will admit that I’m probably in the minority, but I’m fond of a nice long read. I’m open-minded enough to read the short, the quirky and quick on occasion, but generally I like something long and literary. I want the plots to build properly and not take shortcuts to relieve an editor’s fear that my attention span is crippled. I want the characters to be well developed and to evolve. I understand, writers of the world, if you feel the need to keep sentences and book lengths short. But as a nod to those of us readers who think bleak winters are made bearable by warm blankets and big books, could you occasionally offer a compilation of your series rather than making us buy short snippets separately? Our ereaders can hold a lot. And if a plot drags down in the middle, it’s very easy for us to skip pages at the flick of our fingers. It doesn’t waste any trees and we can always return to what we jumped over if we find we missed something plot-valuable. Editing for content is good if the story isn’t sacrificed; but editing to force something to a certain length ought to be a quaint old custom that is happily behind us.
My point in this post is not to take away anyone’s romance, or zombies, or mysteries, or vampires, or young adult forced by a heartless world to battle peers to the death. It’s not to denounce interesting and effective marketing images or to insist that everyone write sweeping epics that would make Tolstoy tremble. All those things work because they provide what many readers want. But this wonderful brave new world of publishing gives new voices and opportunities to readers, just as it does to writers. There is room for the niche book that makes a significant impact on only ten readers as much as there is for the one that appeals to ten thousand. But each of those readers is as valuable as the other. As readers find their voices, it becomes apparent that there are multi-part harmonies in their chorus. That makes the world very beautiful indeed.
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(last edited Feb 21, 2014 05:09AM)
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Jan 17, 2014 02:54PM
(And of course, by Oliver Sachs I meant Oliver Sacks. Sorry about that, Doc. I'm sure there's a neurological reason for the error, e.g. a case of the flibbertigibbets. I have corrected the misspelling.)
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The cover design issue is one of my big pet peeves. For my own work I insist on the artist having read the book before we discuss cover art. I've been lucky, so far, to find artists who are willing to do that. I think even a lot of well-known writers still struggle with covers that don't accurately reflect the contents.
