Books? Nah

A new way of getting out the word, and a new way of distribution, is needed; ask any writer.

Okay, why do people buy books? 

Impulse accounts for many sales.  A bright cover and a cool blurb at the grocery store and wham, a paperback sells. 

Curiosity explains a good many.  Generate a buzz, the publicists all say.  This means get people talking about it.  If a new celebrity biography comes out and all the sudden talk show hosts, coworkers, and bloggers are blathering about it, that book will sell.  People want to see what all the fuss is about, even when they know it's fake buzz stirred up by publicity flacks.

Most books don't get this treatment, though.

Oprah proved a long time ago that merely mentioning a decent book on TV can affect sales.  It helps when the show is as popular as hers, and it also helps when an audience seeks to emulate the host, as hers does, but still, any exposure boosts sales.

Most books do not get promoted.  No ads, no sales reps talking up the book to buyers from franchise bookstores, and no peddlers bribing booksellers the way record companies bribe DJs to play songs. 

Most books are published, sit on very limited shelf space for three days to three weeks, then get remaindered.  Paperbacks have their covers torn off to be mailed back to the publisher for credit, while the books themselves are pulped.  It's cheaper to throw them away than store or ship them.  Secondary sales at a later time don't factor into such profit-loss calculation.  

Remaindered hardcovers are bought at cost and sold at discount to recoup as much as possible.

So how can a book that is getting no promotion, and causing no buzz, sell?

Sheer chance.

The average print run is between 1500 and 5000 copies. Random luck might place the book in front of 1500 - 5000 people who just happen to be interested in it, and have the money for it.

Chances are slim that print run will equal number of interested customers, though, let alone find all of them.  Sales decline steeply when it's hardcovers, which are going for an average of $25 each, but mass market paperbacks now cost the best part of ten bucks each, too, so even they have a sticker shock factor.  

What is lacking?  

Word of mouth has no time to make the rounds, when a book has a shelf-life that is often shorter than that of cottage cheese.  Creating a buzz needs to be done before the book hits the shelves.  That means advance copies, and lots of marketing nonsense, such as phony jabber about how it's the book that did this, or made someone say or do that. 

Wouldn't you buy, "The book that made the President scream"?  Sure you would.

But of course, you’d have to manufacture a fake incident on which to hang such grandiose claims.  Perhaps write a fat book, take a galley proof to the President, and drop it on his foot.  "Made the President dance with outrage," would then be available.

No time for such things?  No access? No money for travel? No stomach for pranks?

Beginning to see the difficulties stacking up like a log jam?

What else is lacking for the average book?  It is born in obscurity into a world that neither asked for it nor wants it now that it's here.  It means nothing to anyone, having not caused even a minor celebrity flap.  And its contents are mysterious because no one has read it yet. People prefer sure things. They want what they already know. Reinforcement, not surprise.

It's lacking an advertisement.  No one's going to seek it out if they don't know about it, what ever it is. Especially a book.

People try all the time to use the internet to get out the word.  Look how blogging has blossomed from a cottage industry to a kind of flash flood threatening to overtake print journalism.  People have something to say and by damn they're going to say it.

Trouble is, they say it so much.  With so many words.  Look at this piece.  It's overly long and has no bullet statements in it.  Bo-ring.  No one will get this far.  I could put in a recipe for currant jam and no one would notice.

So is it hopeless?  Is the average know-nothing book doomed to be pulped after selling to the writer's parents and the few of his cousins deluded enough to think sucking up to a writer will get them anything worthwhile? 

It is hopeless, in the current system, yes.  Unless it's a genre novel, in which case there is a chance it'll sell a certain base number of copies automatically to those who buy books by category.  It happens often enough to sustain some publishers.  

A new way of getting out the word, and a new way of distribution, is needed.

Everyone will immediately think of the internet.  Everyone needs to go lie down 'til that thought passes.  The internet is not a magic solution to anything.  It's too crowded, too clogged, and entirely too splintered.  No way exists to ensure reaching even your best IM friend, let alone masses of people who might like the book you've forced upon the world.

Sure, it can help.  You can now have a website, and you can write www.genestewart.com on your book, your stickers, your posters, and your children's tee shirts.  Why not?  A few who see it might even be stirred to check it out.  Not many, though.

If you came here for answers, I have one for you.  You want to be a writer?  

Pick up a camera.

Do a video blog or make a movie.

Books, outside the corrupt publishing industry, aren't the way to fame, fortune, or influence. No one reads anymore. Oh sure, more books are published and sold than ever before in history, but that’s a function of population density. The same percentage of people read in any given age as in all the others. Higher literacy doesn’t equate to higher book sales. Not in a direct way.

Unless the Republicans pay you to write propaganda, you won’t make money and no one wants the book you’ll write. Worse, it requires reading. Who’ll bother? Why should they?

Answer those questions and you might have a chance of finishing your book, getting it past iditors, getting it published, getting it distributed, and selling a few copies.

Then what?

Unless you genuinely enjoy putting words in order, there is no reason to write. Writing is thankless. No one cares, there is no feedback or even reaction even when something is published, and the only thing you will ever be asked for is free writing and more free writing. Oh, can you write an article for our newsletter? Oh, can you please sign this?

No pay, no respect, and no chance of figuring things out so that writers are suddenly profitable again.

Only the exploitative, lying publishers can squeeze profit from books. And they neither admit this nor share.

So let’s step back. Are you writing in order to have a book in hand? To make a physical object? Or are you telling stories? Do you care about the fiction delivery system used to get your voice to the audience?

Audience means those who listen. It’s about storytelling, which predates writing and is based on the oral tradition. People sitting around campfires at night listening while one of them talks. And the one talking learned to tell stories in a way that kept people listening.

If that’s what you care about, then how your story reaches others is immaterial. An CD is as good as a movie or book. It does not matter, except of course that each format has different requirements. Something intended to be spoken must be different from something intended to be studied on a page. Movies and even plays are entirely different, again.

If you can separate fiction from its format, you may have a chance of making some kind of dent. You could find a job writing ad copy for TV voice-overs. Or telling stories to kids at camp-outs. Not much money in either, but it’s at least making money by using words. Isn’t that what you want?

Why, then, do you write?

Is it really to see a book on a shelf with your name on it? Is it really to fulfill some dim fantasy of celebrity writer, jetting from convention to bookstore, signing autographs and being interviewed by jovial TV hosts?

Are you really that naive?

Not even the rich, famous ones live that more than a few weeks out of every few years, and even they have to court it to get it. Mostly, if they have books out there being sold, it’s because they wrote them. They put words into order.

Which brings us to content. We’ve decided the kind of bottle doesn’t matter, and the label is easily changed. What people who actually read the books they buy ultimately want is content.

What does that mean? A books content is what the words in it add up to. For a reader, it’s an experience. People read books for the fun of it, and to get something out of it. Often, that latter part means they learn things. A book that combines interesting facts with a fun experience will sell. Ask Dan Brown.

Many criticized The Da Vinci Code as a movie in book form. They cited its cinematic attributes, and spoke of its lack of literary ones. There is some validity to this. And it explains why the book is so popular. People reading it enjoyed the experience because it replicated many of the things they enjoy about movies.

Movies immediately involve viewers. Sight and sound, faces and voice, people, places, and things all captivate us.

Put those things into your book and it helps draw an audience.

Literary snobs will sniff and point to one of Proust’s paragraphs as if it’s sculpture. They’ll speak about how one must sift through it over and over to glean all its meanings. They’ll claim literary values, meaning references to other books, allusion, and book-rooted metaphor are somehow more valuable than movie echoes.

This is categorical thinking at its most bigoted.

Fiction changes with every epoch, usually with technology. Cinema has long influenced the written word. Fiction has adopted many cinematic techniques, and vice versa. The two have grown toward one another like spouses in a good marriage.

Denying this is absurd. Embracing it, and seeking further to bring in other kinds of influences, from the internet for example, will expand fiction’s vocabulary and lead to new forms. This will keep it pertinent and allow it to flourish even as conventions change.

Producing a book is only one small way to deliver fiction to potential fans. Those of us who grew up with books, and who love books, will always cherish them, but we who write must realize there are other modes.

We can create those elusive, naive things mentioned at the start of this disjointed, rambling essay: A new way to publish, and a new way to distribute.

We can create such new opportunities for writers by trying new things, exploring new ways of reaching people, and letting each other know what works. By doing this, we can bring fiction with us into the future, no matter how changed and strange it may be.

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Where I Came From

My childhood happened to me in the Laurel Highlands of Western Pennsylvania. I was born in the valley town of Altoona, and raised there and in Munster, a farm township, and Ebensburg, the county seat. It was a move gradually up in altitude, if not necessarily in prestige.

Despite lawyers, judges, and politicos, culture did not surround me. I read more books than the local library shelved. Until I was a teenager, movies meant driving at least 30 miles over dark mountain roads. Theater was Cresson Lake Playhouse and their offerings never interested me. No DRACULA or SWEENY TODD shadowed those footlights.

There was a museum. It held bric-a-brac from rich people who’d died in town over the years. No art brightened its dust.

When the Presbyterian church’s minister from California put on a youth group production of JESUS CHRIST, SUPERSTAR, it was protested. The marchers declined an invitation to come in out of the icy rain for hot chocolate and coffee.

My reading sustained me. At first, classics held my attention. My favorite writer is Dickens. At age 13 I discovered genre writing, accidentally, by picking up The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury along with Islands In the Stream by Ernest Hemingway in the school library.

So I’m one of Bradbury’s literary children. His work, superbly written, blasted my imagination into the cosmos. Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein soon taught me about optimistic futures. Then I hit Harlan Ellison’s collection, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and it hit back. The emotional kick was such that I threw it across the room every half story or so. I distinctly remember thinking: You can DO that?

He could. And did.

From there it was all downhill. I roamed through genre like a revenant from one of the many dystopias I devoured. Sf, mystery, horror, and fantasy held me. I discovered Tolkien entirely on my own, on the bottom wire rack in the Book & Record Shop in the Altoona Mall.

Fascinated me that the three Barbara Remington covers fit together to make a mural. I had to buy them, and did. The notion of extending a novel over three fat volumes also struck me. I brought them home in the back seat of my paternal grandfather’s bottle green Chrysler New Yorker after my optometrist’s appointment on a rainy fall day. They smelled of ink, cinnamon, and vanilla, the last because of the candles in the shop.

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series then featured big in my reading and collecting. My friends and I discussed them.

This world of books is my background. Reading formed me, not place. My sense of place was infused by fantasy and horror ideas. I savored very specific places; a particular branch in the Northern Spy apple tree in my paternal grandparents’ back yard in Munster. A planted a Red Maple that grows there still, although the property has long since been sold to a neighbor who runs a junk shop he calls Mike’s Antiques.

He would riffle through books bought at estate sales, seeking hidden money, then toss them onto a pile that eventually grew to be at least twelve feet high. I climbed into that stack a few times and searched out gems. His peasant’s disdain for books allowed me to buy many collector’s items for a pittance.

What I didn’t understand back then was how his greed reduced the world to things and cash. Imagination, vision, and dreams captured in beautiful prose were starlight to his cave dweller soul; unknown and meaningless.

That’s how almost everyone viewed such things, I found.

In the long series of sliding-door closets on one side of the hall leading to the sun porch upstairs in my paternal grandparents’ house in Munster, on a shelf running 25 feet or more along the back of the one long close behind those sliding doors, I once discovered a cache of paperbacks. There were some Max Brand westerns. No Robert E. Howards, though. What caught my eye were the Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks. Escape On Venus was the first I read, again in the back seat of my grandfather’s car during a Sunday drive, remember those?

Again, I was enthralled. Pulp seemed raw and potent, good moonshine to offset the tamer or more refined distillations I’d been reading. I found Lovecraft around then, too, in a volume my Aunt Polly gave me, saying, It looked weird enough for you.

High compliments like that are as rare as Nobel Prizes for pulp writers, so I savor it to this day. The book was the yellow Lancer edition of The Dunwich Horror & Other Tales.

My writing went through its Dickens, Doyle, and Lovecraft phases. It bled into Poe and sopped up Hemingway. All the while I was becoming what ever it is I am now.

Unlike the Beatles, who clung to their Liverpool roots as a touchstone for everything life brought them; unlike Bradbury, who cherished boyhood summers in the midwest and used them to illuminate his journey; unlike the folks, like Asimov, from Brooklyn, who wore the accent and the attitude like a badge of honor, I had a hostile, somewhat Gothic experience amid the wild folk of the Laurel Highlands of Western Pennsylvania as formative material. So it was mostly books that made me.

Books, and my imagination.

Imaginative literature, as opposed to descriptive, sustained me. It opened me up like a Tardis, so I was far bigger and more complex on the inside than I appeared on the outside.

My books surround me still, and my inner worlds spill into words on pages every day. I’m still creating myself, and still exploring myself, and still discovering myself.

That’s the best way a writer can be.


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