Category: On Reading

Getting Someone to Buy a Book Is Only a Writer’s First Hurdle

This survey over at Book Riot is not at all scientific, but it does match what I’ve been hearing from lots of people.  In the digital age, our “to be read” piles are growing at an exponential rate:

In our latest TBR poll, we got nosy and asked you to reveal how many books are on your TBR. The first thing that became clear is that everyone has their own definition of TBR. We didn’t want to lock you down or limit you, so we just asked for your number and where you keep your TBR, whatever TBR happens to mean to you. As usual, we’ve broken down the numbers, and we’ll leave most of the interpretation up to you.

[Read the rest at BookRiot.com.]

Which raises the additional point:  Getting someone to buy your book is only a writer’s first hurdle, especially today, with an explosion of available books.  Getting them to actually read the book — that’s the next challenge.  My own Kindle has at least a hundred books on it waiting to be read, and that’s to say nothing of the print books weighing down my nightstand or my desk. I doubt I’ll ever get to all of them. It’s also why the initial sales results that writers get using promotional tools like Bookbub.com, while nice if they fatten your bank account, aren’t as significant as the sales that follow in the days, weeks, and months to come — at least if you’re interested in gaining readers, not just buyers.  And that is more about the writing itself then your snappy cover or your catchy blurb, which, while difficult to do right all by themselves, and necessary now just to get a book to the starting line, are very easy when compared to offering your reader a story so engaging they not only read the book immediately, they come back for more.  

It’s something I’ve been thinking quite a bit about lately. Why do I buy a book and read it now when I’ve already bought books that are gathering dust on my bookshelf (with ebooks, metaphorically speaking)?  What makes me read this book but not that one?  Certainly if I pay more for a book, I’m more likely to read it, but not always. I’ve bought books for 99 cents that I read right away. I’ve paid full price for books at Barnes and Noble that are still waiting to be read, years later.

A Novelist Who Doesn’t Read Novels Is Like a Loud-Mouthed Drunk at a Party Who Loves to Talk But Never Listens

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.

It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Neil Gaiman wrote that a couple months ago in The Guardian, and it’s well worth reading the whole thing. It’s the best case for the value of reading, and reading fiction in particular, that I think I’ve seen in a long time. He also has some very nice things to say about the role that libraries and librarians are playing in a world that transformed, in short order, from one in which information was scare to one in which information was overwhelming. Really good stuff.

But when I stumbled upon this article, it got me thinking about another group of people who don’t read fiction.

Fiction writers.

Yeah, you got that right. Fiction writers. Novelists. Not all of them, of course, and certainly not even a majority, but I’ve been surprised lately at how many writers who write fiction who don’t read much fiction.  Most of them read nonfiction, of course, or, if you ask them why they don’t read novels, they often get defensive and say they get their story fix in other ways, from movies or television shows.  Which is all well and good, but it’s not the same.   You see, I think of my fiction as part of The Great Conversation of Literature.  If I’m not engaged in a two-way conversation, then I’m like a loud-mouthed drunk at a party who’s telling you all about this antics but doesn’t hear a word you say when you ask a question.  My novel, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, is part of a conversation that started when I read J.D. Salinger as a teen.  My book, The Gray and Guilty Sea, is my entry into a conversation that includes Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and of course John D. MacDonald.  Heck, the title of that book is a direct homage to MacDonald.  My book, Wooden Bones, took a book that had entered the public domain, Carlos Collodi’s Pinocchio, and kept a conversation going that includes everyone from the Brothers Grimm to . . . well, Neil Gaiman himself, whose book, Coraline, and its wonderfully dark feel, inspired me to write something along the same lines.

I’m not the most voracious reader in the world, but I read a lot of novels.  I read a lot of nonfiction, too, but fiction is the coin of my realm.  It’s the ongoing conversation, the one that began long before I was born and will continue long after I’m gone.

If you’re a fiction writer who’s not reading fiction, you may have readers, and you may even have a lot of them, but I doubt you’re going to grow much as a writer.  And if you’re not growing as a writer, what’s the point?  Just paying the bills?  Sure, that’s important, and I can’t blame any writer for doing what they have to do to put bread on the table, but it’s so much more rewarding to engage in a two-way conversation rather than coming off as someone who’s just drunk on their own words.

Ebooks Are to Printed Books as Airplanes Are to Bicycles

“Kevin Kelly is not a dumb guy — far from it actually. As the founding executive editor of Wired and one of the people who helped build The Well, among the earliest online communities, he has done a good job of seeing what is coming next for decades.

But last year, he had what sounded to me like a dumb idea. Mr. Kelly edits and owns Cool Tools, a website that writes about neat stuff and makes small money off referral revenue from Amazon when people proceed to buy some of those things. He decided to edit the thousands of reviews that had accrued over the last 10 years into a self-published print catalog — also called “Cool Tools” — which he would then sell for $39.99 …”  [Read the rest of “Print Settles into Its Niches” at The New York Times.]

The whole article is worth reading, but I’m not sure why it surprises people so much, even considering the book’s subject matter.  The printed book is a pretty remarkable device:  cheap, portable, disposable if need be, and human-powered.  On top of that, they often have great aesthetic value.  Ebooks are great.  I love them.  But they’re just another mode of conveying information.  The Wright Brothers, who made their early mark manufacturing bicycles, may have launched the greatest technology disrupter of all time with the airplane, but bicycles didn’t go away.  Sometimes a bicycle is just a better way to get around.