Some thoughts on potential. Market potential.

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How many copies of a book do you need to sell to make it a best seller?

By definition the audience for literary fiction — for difficult, or as Ralph Nadir would prefer ;-) “challenging” books — is smaller than the audience for mainstream books.

It’s probably impossible to know for sure how small, but that doesn’t stop people from speculating. Via Publishers Marketplace, in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, James Adams writes that 15 years ago, it was estimated that about 3000 Canadians read “serious” books. Adams speculates that number has since fallen by as much as half.

The adjective “serious” was never precisely defined, but it was understood to describe those readers who could be counted on to go to a bookstore at least once a week and buy one or two titles on each occasion, mixing purchases of fiction with those of non-fiction. Since then . . . that estimate has dropped, I’m told, to between 1,600 and 2,000, the result, one imagines, of the competing distractions-attractions of the Internet and the rise of digital media.

In 1993 (about the same time the 3000 figure was being floated for Canada) Kurt Andersen wrote an essay for Time, “It’s a Small World After All,” in which he attempted to suss out the size of the market for “high end cultural artifacts,” including the market for literary fiction. He noted that

250,000 Americans bought Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera in hardcover. Every thoughtful reader in America did not, despite Knopf’s best efforts, buy the Garcia Marquez novel, meaning that the potential audience for any given book is larger. “It might even be a million,” says Knopf’s Ann Close, who edits Alice Munro and Norman Rush, among others. On the other hand, all the actual buyers of any typical serious novel would fit in Fenway Park, or even a Vegas showroom.

Presumably, a “typical serious novel” would be one written by someone without the sort of reputation Garcia Marquez enjoys. So how many actual buyers might this novelist count on?

If we extrapolate from Adams’ figures we can just multiply by ten (since Canada’s population is roughly 1/10 of the United States’). That would put the US lit fic market size at somewhere around 20,000 people today.

Think that’s low? I dunno, maybe it is. It’s a long way from that quarter of a million figure for Garcia Marquez’ book. What possessed all those people to buy Love in the Time of Cholera? Were they all shopping for I’m-quite-the-intellectual coffeetable tchotchkes? Why aren’t they buying other lit fiction? Hey, why aren’t they buying serious Canadian books?

By way of context, some 280 million copies of Nora Roberts’ novels have been sold to date. Granted, she’s prolific (this registration-required NY Times article mentions her next book as number 166) but that still averages to over 1.5 million copies per book.

OTOH, most commercial fiction doesn’t scale those heights. John Scalzi* cites the New York Times as his source for this fact: a mainstream novel is considered a bestseller if it sells 25,000 copies.

(Scalzi also says that anecdotally it seems publishers offer larger advances on lit fiction than on genre fiction — despite the fact that lit fiction may have poorer odds to earn out. Gambler’s fallacy perhaps?)

* AKA the guy who just won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

It’s the mindset that dooms them

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Blogs that cover the cultural and economic effects of the Internet on newspaper publishing are all linking a couple of articles in The Economist about the latter’s dire straits:

For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year. Papers are also losing their share of advertising spending. Classified advertising is quickly moving online. Jim Chisholm, of iMedia, a joint-venture consultancy with IFRA, a newspaper trade association, predicts that a quarter of print classified ads will be lost to digital media in the next ten years. Overall, says iMedia, newspapers claimed 36% of total global advertising in 1995 and 30% in 2005. It reckons they will lose another five percentage points by 2015.

So what are newspapers to do?

Gal Beckerman, at CJR Daily, ends a summary of the piece with this little zinger:

If the only way to make newspapers profitable is to turn “fine journalism” into junk, than maybe we should start thinking about whether or not news is too precious a commodity to be subjected to the same economic rules by which one sells widgets or hamburgers.

That would be “free market” rules, right? Bring on state-subsidized newspapers!

Meanwhile Jeff Jarvis excerpts from this companion piece in a post titled “Who Saved the Treees?” — and notes that it ends hopefully. This is about change, after all. And change is only a threat if you aren’t willing to change with it.

I was thinking last night about how Google has made a fortune organizing content for people without regard to its quality while newspapers husband their content jealously — in essence, they place a higher value on the content than on peoples’ access to it. “This is so good, you have to pay to see it.” “If you want to read this, you have to register and maintain an account with us.”

It’s a completely different mindset. No wonder the newspaper industry is in flames.

Fawns

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Golfed with my parents this evening at a course they play often in Chenango County. There’s a doe with twin fawns that they see all the time around the second hole/third tee, and sure enough they were out tonight. I managed to get several pics of the fawns before they stepped into the underbrush. Not that they were in a particular hurry. They don’t let the golfers bother them much.

fawns

(Yeah, I know this doesn’t hold a candle to the photos a certain blogger‘s wife captures when they’re out on the course :-))

Slime mold isn’t mold after all?

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Slime mold is one of those things you encounter when you wander around in the woods, like moss and lichens.

I always thought it was a fungus.

But now I read this article by Chet Raymo, [UPDATE: original story now disappeared, sorry] and it turns out that slime mold isn’t a fungus, but . . . well, something else entirely.

For part of its life cycle it lives as “free-roaming amoebas, single-celled organisms, grazing on bacteria” — during this stage it’s invisible to the naked eye.

If the supply of bacteria runs out, however, some of the organisms “secrete a chemical called acrasin, after Acrasia, the cruel witch in Spenser’s Faerie Queen who attracted men and turned them into beasts. It is a call. A signal.” This caused the organisms to clump into the slime form — at which point the mass is able to move by sliding, say, down a log — and then, when it reaches a suitable spot, organisms within the mass organize to form fruiting bodies.

Raymo gives details of this process in a very readable way, so click through if you enjoy that sort of thing. Incredible stuff.

Raymo then writes that it’s “now widely agreed”

that slime molds are neither plant nor animal nor fungus but members of the kingdom Protoctista, which encompasses some of the most ancient single-celled organisms . . . in their curious life cycle slime molds recapitulate that episode in the history of life, which occurred about 700 million years ago, when single-celled microorganisms, having lived on their own for 3 billion years, came together to form multicellular organisms. Invisible life became gloriously visible, and wonderfully diverse. Creatures individually smaller than the point of a pin piled themselves together to become, in the fullness of time, brontosauruses and blue whales.

Something to muse upon the next time you see a splotch of “dog vomit fungus” in your perennial bed.

Why they say “no”

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POD-dy Mouth sheds a bit more insight into the agent rejection thing — specifically why an agent would love your novel but still decide he/she wouldn’t be able to sell it:

What you, aspiring writer, are forgetting, is that while an agent may sell (as an example) mysteries and yours is a stellar one, he/she may know that his/her editorial contacts will not go for your particular mystery for some offhand reason. Agents, to varying degrees, sell to the same editors over and over. Examples: Jenny Bent (Trident) sells regularly to Denise Roy (S&S), Dorian Karchmar (William Morris) sells regularly to Claire Wachtel (William Morrow), Elaine Koster sells regularly to Carrie Feron (William Morrow), and so forth. The point is these agents know what these editors want . . . specifically. So if your novel’s protagonist happens to be a coke addict and Agent A’s contacts aren’t much for characters with substance abuse issues, you’re out of luck, no matter how deftly written your novel may be.

Interesting. So to some degree, agents act as scouts for particular editors . . . you learn something new every day.

Step away from the book

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In the Telegraph, Nick Hornby wonders at our insistence on reading “difficult” books:

. . . we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good.

I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005’s ‘Books of the Year’ lists.

They were struggling. Both of these people are parents – they each, coincidentally, have three children – and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a 20th-century world figure.

At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he’d put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he’d dared hope. He then realised that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.)

Hornby then comes to a theme I’ve blogged about before: the artificial & unhelpful split between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. We’ve come to believe that there’s something superior about books that are difficult or that better us, somehow. But perhaps this is a conceit:

Those Dickens-readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell – were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is literary now, of course, because the books are old.

But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters.

Read the article & then let me know what you think. Is it best if people read soley for the sheer pleasure of it?

Another lit agent blogging: Rachel Vater

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OK, this is so cool. Bernita at An Innocent A-Blog has posted about some blogs she reads regularly, including one kept by literary agent Rachel Vater of Lowenstein-Yost Associates.

Another agency to add to my blogroll :-)

But it gets better. I queried that agency in July (got a “no” back the next day) and it turns out, Rachel blogs about queries she reads and her response to them. So by scrolling back to July 10 I found her note about mine:

4. An adult novel about discovering little fairies. It’s really the tone of this novel that makes me think it’s not right for me. It seems sweet, light, and romantic. Maybe perfect for someone else, but I tend to like very funny, or else very kick ass, or darker, edgier paranormal novels. Sweet isn’t quite for me.

This really points out how fraught with peril is the querying process. My first version of my query read too dark (Kristin Nelson passed on it for that reason!) so I lightened it. Then maybe midway through the querying process, I decided I’d gotten it too sweet and modified it again.

I don’t know if the book is right for Vater (and since I’ve received multiple requests for fulls at this point I’m not going to lose any sleep over it) but I think I missed my chance with her because of my query, not because of the book itself.

Incidentally, the interface for submitting to this agency isn’t an email address — it’s an online form. As a result, I wasn’t able to include 5 sample pages, which I typically do as per the divine Miss Snark’s regularly repeated advice.

The sample pages would be plenty to show that the novel’s tone isn’t exactly “sweet and light,” although it has its comic and romantic moments.

Coincidentally, Miss Snark touched on the inherent inadequecy of query letters again this weekend:

You can write the world’s worst query letter and if you have good writing attached to it, I’m not going to pass. It’s not the query letter that keeps you from “yes”: it’s the writing. I’ve said it before, here it is again: most query letters suck. Good writing trumps all.

Two of my requests for fulls came from the query plus first five pages. It’s the five pages that dunnit. I so owe Miss Snark.

“Secret Society Girl,” by Diana Peterfreund

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I’ve been looking forward to reading this book every since making my cyber-acquaintance with Diana earlier this year. Diana’s living the dream of every aspiring writer of commercial women’s fiction: she’s pursued publication determinedly and is now reaping the rewards with a debut novel, Secret Society Girl, — issued by Delacorte in hardcover — that’s garnered significant press including reviews in Bloomberg News, the New York Observer, Booklist, and The Washington Post.

She’s also smart and high-energy (if you need proof of that just follow her blog!) and is dedicated to mastering the craft of writing and the ins & outs of commercial fiction as a profession.

So it’s no surprise that Secret Society Girl is a well-structured novel. The characters come alive — I feel I could practically pick them out on the street — and the pacing is excellent.

The book’s setting is a fictional Ivy League campus (Diana’s a Yalie) and the mileu is definitely the 20-something crowd; since I haven’t been 20 in (ahem) some time, and since my politics tend toward libertarianism rather than the heroine’s liberalism and have also had a lot of their rough edges knocked off over the years, I am not exactly a 1:1 fit with the book’s natural born audience. All the more tribute, then, to Diana’s writing that the narrative engaged me as it did. Never once did my attention to Amy’s fate flag; never once did I lose interest in the story’s arc.

Diana’s now working on the book’s sequel, of course — but I, for one, am equally interested in where she’ll go as a writer once the Secret Society franchise has run its course. I have no doubt she’ll be scaling some impressive peaks. It’s going to be wonderful to watch.

Newspaper registration has to go

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The lede from this piece (which I think was taken from an AP story run on CNN.com, although it’s not clear) sums it up perfectly:

Imagine if a trip to the corner newsstand required handing over your name, address, age, and income to the cashier before you could pick up the daily newspaper.

That’s close to the experience of many online readers, who must complete registration forms with various kinds of personal data before seeing their virtual newspaper…

I currently have a page of college-lined paper crammed with combinations of user names and passwords. Some of these are for accounts with companies who handle my money or credit card information. I can understand that.

But it’s to the point where I absolutely refuse to add more combos to this list. It’s insane.

If that means I don’t read some article online, so be it.

I’m not alone in my sentiments, of course. Here’s an argument by Adrian Holovaty that online newspaper registration is not only irritating, but self-defeating.

Everyone I’ve talked to (techies and non-techies alike) sees this type of registration as an extremely annoying barrier with no redeeming value. There’s no personal tie to a typical news-site registration account, no incentive to give accurate information or even care about who has access to your account . . .

(No, saying “Registered users get more highly-targeted ads!” isn’t enough. Neither is saying “The benefit of registration is that you get the content.” That’s nothing short of arrogant — and readers can and will get their regurgitated AP stories elsewhere.)

And here’s a post by Simon Willison that offers a link to a site called BugMeNot which provides user name/password combinations you can use to access newspaper sites.

Well, okay, that way you don’t have to go through the rigamorole of filling out the form. But you still can’t just read the article.

The worst offender by far, btw, is a certain online paper that doesn’t ask you to register when you first click on their article.

They wait until you’ve read 2/3 of it.

What are they thinking?

“Hey, let’s not just inconvenience our online audience — let’s try to infuriate them! Maybe we can make a killing selling ads for tranquilizers!”

You will never see a link to that site on this blog, I’ll tell you that.

The trout got flushed

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One of the first writer blogs I linked on my blogroll was Brown Trout’s Next Book, purportedly kept by an overweight, aging, thrice-divorced academic who had enjoyed a stint of literary success some years ago, but subsequently saw his career tank in part due to his heaving drinking and self-destructiveness.

On August 9, the trout published a post that began like this:

A Disclosure

Hi there. It’s me talking to you. The name’s Dave, and I’m a writer…of sorts.

Same guy as before, but not really. While I do share similar eccentricities and passions to the creature you’ve come to know as The Brown Trout, I am distinct in that I am not a character of fiction. I’m a real guy. Flesh and bone.

Like BT, I’m a writer. I also work for a major university. Unlike BT, I’ve no real publishing history. I’ve also only been married once, not thrice. And if BT and I were to square of in the ring, he’d hold a significant weight advantage. Also, I’ve never had a heart attack.

But I have written a few novels. Two are pretty good. One really sucked. Another is in the works and will be wrapped up in time for Christmas. It’s the best thing I’ve done yet. I’ve also scribbled down at least fifty short stories, of which four have been published. I’ve picked up a few prizes and that notorious MFA degree. Oh, and I also have written a screenplay.

The blog’s now gone.

I supposed it’s a given that writers suffer a compulsion to create fictional worlds. So why should blogs, as a medium, be exempt?

All the same, I like “Dave” far more than I liked his his fictional creation, and I’m glad BT is now folded away someplace, I imagine rather like a balloon deflated & creased the day after the Macy’s parade.

Off to edit my blogroll . . .

(Oh, lest this be lost forever, BT submitted a question, in character, to Miss Snark — and commenters unfamiliar with his blog immediately detected the whiff of fakery. BT responded to their skepticism in the comments: “Despite the insinuations of the previous commenter, I can assure you I am as real as Mr. Frey, and likely more so.”)