Authors are from Mars, Readers are from Venus
A number of recent discussion threads on Goodreads and Absolute Write have got me thinking about the relationship between authors and readers. There’s too much to say in the forums, so I thought it would make a good blog post.
A common theme amongst authors is: “I have written a damn good book - why doesn’t anyone want to read it?”
This is often closely followed by: “Many of the books that do sell by the gazillion are rubbish. My book is better than those. It’s so unfair.”
The flipside of this is that many Goodreads forums are full of authors pimping their books. Some readers are getting fed up with the avalanche of author fly-by posts. “Read my book! Free for a limited time! Book one of a series!”
And if you are tempted to look at these books, in nine times out of ten you are put off within the first few sentences. Many are badly written. Glaring spelling and grammar mistakes. Poor technique. Dull characters. Derivative plots. There are some gems, but to find them you have to wade through one hell of a lot of dross.
We have had a thread recently about readers giving feedback to authors. Some authors don’t seem to want feedback, and when they do get it they argue with the reader, saying that it is the reader’s fault that they did not like the book.
But then it is hard to know what makes a book good or not. Some books get almost universal praise on Goodreads, with mostly 4 and 5 star ratings. Others seem to divide opinion - books like the Da Vinci Code and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which seem to receive both 1 and 5 star reviews.
So what exactly is going on? How can we find a way through this mess, whether as authors or readers? An apology in advance. What follows may annoy some people.
The bottom line for me is that this is a commercial market, and this means that the reader is King. Or more often these days, Queen. Readers will read those books that give them the experience they want. If they want to read mostly fantasy, romance and erotica, then that is what they want to read. There is no point in an author complaining that there is no market for books about the mating habits of turtles, or whatever it is that they have just written. We have to follow the market.
Some rare authors and/ or books can create markets, but not very many. Tolkien, EL James, JK Rowling come to mind. Most authors will be following trends not creating them. Let’s put these outliers to one side, where they belong.
Publishing is currently in the middle of a gold rush. People have heard of the JK Rowling and Hugh Howey success stories. They want something like that for themselves. And the introduction of e books and the internet has meant that it has never been easier to publish your own book. Hence the gold rush.
Like the various gold rushes that history has seen, only a small proportion will get rich. Most will be utterly disappointed and fall by the wayside. The vast majority of self-published books will not sell in anything like the numbers that their authors want.
Why? There are two reasons – quantity and quality.
The quantity argument first. With so many books out there, not all can succeed. There simply aren’t enough readers. What we will inevitably see is what the statisticians call a “normal” distribution which means that, at one end of the scale, a very small number of authors will sell a very large number of books.
At the other end of the curve, a very large number of authors will sell a very small number of books.
And somewhere in the middle will be the mid-listers experience varying degrees of success.
The $64,000 question, of course, is how do you move from one category to another. How do you get from struggling newbie to surviving midlister? How do you go from midlister to superstar?
Most successful authors tell a similar story. They started the business by being rejected oodles of times. They didn’t let that stop them. They carried on trying, learning from their mistakes, writing, reading, submitting, failing, submitting again. Some lucky few make it on their first attempt, but most writers have to suffer a few knocks before success.
Now we need to talk about quality. Most writers and publishers know that there is a minimum standard for writing. There are some basic rules about what makes an acceptable book. Not a great book, just acceptable. Things like these:
• No spelling or grammar mistakes (unless justified by the plot).
• Convincing characters
• A strong plot
• A sense of danger
• Well written enough so that the reader can understand it.
• An absence of purple prose (prune those adjectives)
• A well written blurb that hooks the reader
• A good cover.
Many self-published books fail at this point. And this is where something interesting is happening. In the days before self-publishing really took off, the publishing industry had gatekeepers. Editors, publishers and agents would reject books that they didn’t think would sell. Many authors found this to be a frustrating process, but it did impose a certain minimum quality threshold. The successful authors were generally those who learned what the gatekeepers wanted. They improved the quality of their work until the agents and publishers started to say yes.
Those gatekeepers are being bypassed at the moment. Self-publishing allows an author to go straight to market without any checks or balance. What this means is that the gate-keeping role has shifted. Instead of the publishing industry reading through the slush pile, it is now the readers who are doing this job. We are all editors now.
And that means that readers are getting good at the sort of things an editor or agent would do – reading a blurb or the first few words of a book and deciding whether it is any good or not. Many experienced editors can tell within the first few words of a book whether it is something that has a commercial prospect. Not the first few chapters or the first few pages – the first few words. And we as readers are developing those skills too.
So when an author complains that nobody is reading their books, there are two main explanations – either they are not marketing their book well enough or they are not giving readers what they want. That is why it is really important for authors to ask for feedback and act on it.
On the face of it, that sounds really easy. Give the readers what they want, act on feedback and success and riches will surely be yours, yes?
Um, no. There’s a problem. You see a writer can easily become word-blind. They spend ages crafting a sentence until they are happy with it. What they can’t always do is to see it how a reader would see it. They are absolutely convinced that what they have written is great while their readers are more in the territory of “meh” or 1 star reviews or simply not bothering to read it.
That’s why I think that writers are from a different planet to readers – even though most writers are also voracious readers. A writer will focus on the minutiae of the craft – this word or that word? Should I add an adjective here or leave it out? A comma or a semi colon.
At this level of detail, most readers don’t care. They want excitement and plot. They are reading far faster than any writer can write. That sentence that you spent an hour crafting? Your reader zipped over it in a second.
Writers often obsess about words and sentences. Readers are far more interested in paragraphs and chapters.
Some authors think that books will sell if they are written well, if every page is a literary masterpiece. The reality is that most readers tend to be more interested in character, situation and plot. A book can be successful if it tells a great story, even if the standard of the writing is not of the highest quality. The writing needs to get over the minimum quality thresholds, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.
There is an answer. When we bypassed the gatekeepers, we lost access to a vast amount of understanding and experience. Editors and agents are not just those nasty so-and-so’s who rejected our wonderful manuscripts. They are also very good at knowing what the public wants. They insist on minimum quality standards. They promote books that will excite readers, whether this is by peerless prose or just a lot of bonking in books like Fifty Shades (which most certainly does not have peerless prose).
A publisher would also deal with the marketing of a book, the editing and proof-reading, the cover, the blurb. In many cases, each of these tasks would be handed to an expert who would be pretty good at their job.
For self-publishers to be successful they need to add back in that level of expertise and quality. This may mean developing those skills for themselves. It may mean buying in an expert to do the things that you can’t, such as developing a cover or running a marketing strategy.
The future, I think, is that the gap between self-published and traditionally published will narrow. More and more self-publishers will run their writing as a business. They will hire professional cover designers, proof-readers, marketing experts. Their books will become indistinguishable from trade published. In effect they will become mini publishers themselves.
But the root to all of this is the relationship between the reader and the author. Authors need to give readers what they want and the reader is (nearly) always right.
A common theme amongst authors is: “I have written a damn good book - why doesn’t anyone want to read it?”
This is often closely followed by: “Many of the books that do sell by the gazillion are rubbish. My book is better than those. It’s so unfair.”
The flipside of this is that many Goodreads forums are full of authors pimping their books. Some readers are getting fed up with the avalanche of author fly-by posts. “Read my book! Free for a limited time! Book one of a series!”
And if you are tempted to look at these books, in nine times out of ten you are put off within the first few sentences. Many are badly written. Glaring spelling and grammar mistakes. Poor technique. Dull characters. Derivative plots. There are some gems, but to find them you have to wade through one hell of a lot of dross.
We have had a thread recently about readers giving feedback to authors. Some authors don’t seem to want feedback, and when they do get it they argue with the reader, saying that it is the reader’s fault that they did not like the book.
But then it is hard to know what makes a book good or not. Some books get almost universal praise on Goodreads, with mostly 4 and 5 star ratings. Others seem to divide opinion - books like the Da Vinci Code and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which seem to receive both 1 and 5 star reviews.
So what exactly is going on? How can we find a way through this mess, whether as authors or readers? An apology in advance. What follows may annoy some people.
The bottom line for me is that this is a commercial market, and this means that the reader is King. Or more often these days, Queen. Readers will read those books that give them the experience they want. If they want to read mostly fantasy, romance and erotica, then that is what they want to read. There is no point in an author complaining that there is no market for books about the mating habits of turtles, or whatever it is that they have just written. We have to follow the market.
Some rare authors and/ or books can create markets, but not very many. Tolkien, EL James, JK Rowling come to mind. Most authors will be following trends not creating them. Let’s put these outliers to one side, where they belong.
Publishing is currently in the middle of a gold rush. People have heard of the JK Rowling and Hugh Howey success stories. They want something like that for themselves. And the introduction of e books and the internet has meant that it has never been easier to publish your own book. Hence the gold rush.
Like the various gold rushes that history has seen, only a small proportion will get rich. Most will be utterly disappointed and fall by the wayside. The vast majority of self-published books will not sell in anything like the numbers that their authors want.
Why? There are two reasons – quantity and quality.
The quantity argument first. With so many books out there, not all can succeed. There simply aren’t enough readers. What we will inevitably see is what the statisticians call a “normal” distribution which means that, at one end of the scale, a very small number of authors will sell a very large number of books.
At the other end of the curve, a very large number of authors will sell a very small number of books.
And somewhere in the middle will be the mid-listers experience varying degrees of success.
The $64,000 question, of course, is how do you move from one category to another. How do you get from struggling newbie to surviving midlister? How do you go from midlister to superstar?
Most successful authors tell a similar story. They started the business by being rejected oodles of times. They didn’t let that stop them. They carried on trying, learning from their mistakes, writing, reading, submitting, failing, submitting again. Some lucky few make it on their first attempt, but most writers have to suffer a few knocks before success.
Now we need to talk about quality. Most writers and publishers know that there is a minimum standard for writing. There are some basic rules about what makes an acceptable book. Not a great book, just acceptable. Things like these:
• No spelling or grammar mistakes (unless justified by the plot).
• Convincing characters
• A strong plot
• A sense of danger
• Well written enough so that the reader can understand it.
• An absence of purple prose (prune those adjectives)
• A well written blurb that hooks the reader
• A good cover.
Many self-published books fail at this point. And this is where something interesting is happening. In the days before self-publishing really took off, the publishing industry had gatekeepers. Editors, publishers and agents would reject books that they didn’t think would sell. Many authors found this to be a frustrating process, but it did impose a certain minimum quality threshold. The successful authors were generally those who learned what the gatekeepers wanted. They improved the quality of their work until the agents and publishers started to say yes.
Those gatekeepers are being bypassed at the moment. Self-publishing allows an author to go straight to market without any checks or balance. What this means is that the gate-keeping role has shifted. Instead of the publishing industry reading through the slush pile, it is now the readers who are doing this job. We are all editors now.
And that means that readers are getting good at the sort of things an editor or agent would do – reading a blurb or the first few words of a book and deciding whether it is any good or not. Many experienced editors can tell within the first few words of a book whether it is something that has a commercial prospect. Not the first few chapters or the first few pages – the first few words. And we as readers are developing those skills too.
So when an author complains that nobody is reading their books, there are two main explanations – either they are not marketing their book well enough or they are not giving readers what they want. That is why it is really important for authors to ask for feedback and act on it.
On the face of it, that sounds really easy. Give the readers what they want, act on feedback and success and riches will surely be yours, yes?
Um, no. There’s a problem. You see a writer can easily become word-blind. They spend ages crafting a sentence until they are happy with it. What they can’t always do is to see it how a reader would see it. They are absolutely convinced that what they have written is great while their readers are more in the territory of “meh” or 1 star reviews or simply not bothering to read it.
That’s why I think that writers are from a different planet to readers – even though most writers are also voracious readers. A writer will focus on the minutiae of the craft – this word or that word? Should I add an adjective here or leave it out? A comma or a semi colon.
At this level of detail, most readers don’t care. They want excitement and plot. They are reading far faster than any writer can write. That sentence that you spent an hour crafting? Your reader zipped over it in a second.
Writers often obsess about words and sentences. Readers are far more interested in paragraphs and chapters.
Some authors think that books will sell if they are written well, if every page is a literary masterpiece. The reality is that most readers tend to be more interested in character, situation and plot. A book can be successful if it tells a great story, even if the standard of the writing is not of the highest quality. The writing needs to get over the minimum quality thresholds, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.
There is an answer. When we bypassed the gatekeepers, we lost access to a vast amount of understanding and experience. Editors and agents are not just those nasty so-and-so’s who rejected our wonderful manuscripts. They are also very good at knowing what the public wants. They insist on minimum quality standards. They promote books that will excite readers, whether this is by peerless prose or just a lot of bonking in books like Fifty Shades (which most certainly does not have peerless prose).
A publisher would also deal with the marketing of a book, the editing and proof-reading, the cover, the blurb. In many cases, each of these tasks would be handed to an expert who would be pretty good at their job.
For self-publishers to be successful they need to add back in that level of expertise and quality. This may mean developing those skills for themselves. It may mean buying in an expert to do the things that you can’t, such as developing a cover or running a marketing strategy.
The future, I think, is that the gap between self-published and traditionally published will narrow. More and more self-publishers will run their writing as a business. They will hire professional cover designers, proof-readers, marketing experts. Their books will become indistinguishable from trade published. In effect they will become mini publishers themselves.
But the root to all of this is the relationship between the reader and the author. Authors need to give readers what they want and the reader is (nearly) always right.
date
newest »
newest »
You mentioned 'gold rushes' Will, don't forget that there was a big element of luck, chance, hazard etc by being in the right place at the right time.
Do you think there's any chance of my book on the mating habits of turtles doing well as erotic?But yes, if you're not writing what people want to read then unless you can get your book used as an exam set text, it isn't going to be read.
Lynne - well, yes a part of this is luck, particularly for the likes of JK Rowlings and EL James. They happened to write the right stories at the right time.But I do strongly believe that it's more down to practice and knowing the market than luck for most people below such exalted levels. Certainly it doesn't take luck to knock out the basic errors that we see every day from the fly-bys.
Jim - why not? when and if we can teach other turtles how to read ...
I didn't mean luck in writing I meant luck when the book's publicity went viral as in EL James's. It wasn't it's literary qualities. I still think that was chance.
Lynne - absolutely agree. For me the fifty shades phenomenon was largely down to the introduction of e-readers. Readers, particularly women, realised that they could read erotica without anyone around them knowing it. A kindle or nook looks the same whether you are reading the bible or something racy like "Restraint and Retribution".Fifty shades just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was the one that everyone was talking about as this trend happened. There are far better examples of female-orientated erotica out there - not that I'm an expert on the subject.
Similar for Harry Potter. I actually thought that Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy was better, but it seems that Harry Potter somehow managed to strike more of a chord with readers.
So yes, there is a large element of luck, although you still need to write a half decent book in the first place.
There is much common sense here. I have hated some books that have caught the public's imagination. Mainstream publishing will become about picking out the indies proving to have potential and marketing them up into hits.I write the stories that I would enjoy reading and have been fortunate to find that some other people enjoy reading them. In business the two basic tenets are have know your market and tailor your products to them. That's harder to do in writing, perhaps, without producing derivative pap and for some of us deliberately producing derivative pap just because it sells would be an issue. Others make a living out of mass-producing OK writing for certain markets and good for them.
The main question for an author to ask themselves is whether they are writing for money, for lofty recognition of their talent or because it does something for them. Then, they can adjust their process accordingly.
There are millions of people whose songs are never heard, whose stories are never read, whose paintings are never seen, but we all keep on creating. It's built into us. It's what we do. We now have the opportunity to put what we do up for the world to see, but the world does not necessarily have the time to stop and look or listen.
If you build it, they MAY come. If they don't, build another one, but either build it for them to enjoy or build it to satisfy yourself.The factors governing the rest are too diverse for most of us to control.
I doubt that any of this makes sense and it certainly wasn't meant to be this long.
Very well argued. But the blog post is about fiction and there are other factors that come into play with non-fiction. Best-sellers appear there too, with cookery, biography and gardening making money. Usually those writers have established their expertise, perhaps with a TV programme.The point made in the previous post by Darren is crucial. Anyone who has read about JK Rowling's fortune and thinks writing is a good route will stumble. Someone who just loves words/ putting an argument together/ explaining a topic will find a market and enjoy the day's work. A storyteller has options other than the 80k words book - radio drama or manga? The person who has something they need to say will keep going even without meeting the overheads of software and felt-tip pens. When confronting an outcome which isn't what that writer wanted, a cool look at what he/she is aiming for and why might point to a different approach.
Darren - it makes a lot of sense. The only point I would add is that while it's great to write for yourself, that does not mean that indie niche books can't be well produced, free of spelling mistakes, strongly marketed, good cover, etc.We may never be able to sell the 400-450 million of J K Rowling or the 350 million of Stephen King. We may not want to write for the obviously popular genres. But I do believe that we can all increase our sales by improving the professionalism of the books that we put out.
If we build it, they may come. If we build it with a dozen spelling mistakes on the first page, they are less likely to come.
There is no reason why an indie should not be indistinguishable from a traditionally published book.
Then the indies should be able to exploit their natural advantages. We can bring books to market much more quickly. We can explore areas that a traditional publisher would be reluctant to get into. We can take risks. A good indie could be a velociraptor to a big publisher's T-Rex.
But we've got to hit those minimum publishing standards.
Lydia - fully agree. This business isn't easy and the J K Rowlings are exceedingly rare.
Very well said, will. So many, too many, indie writers release work that is like a first draft in terms of grammar and spelling errors. It truly does interrupt the flow, and readers want to be taken to another world and not have that world interrupted by grammatical errors and spelling mistakes so they have to stop and figure out where the story is going.
I really enjoyed reading this but not convinced.I think any artist (music, writers, painting, drama) needs to be true to themselves and - if they are good - an audience will develop, build and support them.
If all authors 'try' to write 'what readers want' then there will be a mass wave of middle of the road dullness, which may be what we are seeing with all the spam, a confused message that even the author doesn't get, and writing to a pre-defined template.
Tolkien certainly wrote to satisfy himself with the story first and foremost and without the market norm in his mind, as did Rowling and many others I'm sure. The magic they weaved then convinced readers to go on the journey with them. Not a quick win, but true to what they believed in.
I'm not saying criticism isn't needed - it is - but sometimes the audience may not 'get' what an artist is trying to say/get across ... and that's okay, but it doesn't always mean the artist must change or do what a market dictates.
Sorry - ex-musician ;)
Write it and they will come? I'm not so sure. Some works of art can be so intensely personal that they struggle to find an audience. In musical terms, there is a very good reason why few top ten records feature twenty minute long drum solos!My understanding is that both Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter were heavily influenced by their respective publishers' expertise of what would sell. Tolkien's publisher specifically asked for a sequel to the Hobbit. JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter very much with publication in mind. Both were edited, revised and marketed by publishing companies who understood what readers want.
The artist doesn't have to follow the market. Some talented and lucky souls may even be able to create a new market for themselves. But they are still doing this by pleasing the audience, even if this is by giving the audience something that they don't realise they want.
Agree - an artist has to please their audience, but sometimes that requires the artist to 'grow' an audience rather than playing to an already seated gallery. :)
Sometimes. Mind you, I see a very large gap between the 1.5 million self-published books on Amazon and an artist who can grow an audience! We can't all be the Beatles.
Going to happily share this on Facebook.