Tag Archives: commercial fiction

The novel as a form

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I’ve have been thinking about the novel as a form. And how — despite what I once deeply believed — I no longer see the “genre” v “literary fiction” as a useful model for understanding the publishing industry.

Here’s how I see it, now.

Novels their start as medium for long, drawn-out stories, serving increasingly literate middle class audiences. Think 17th-19th century, pubbed in serial form in newspapers.

The best novelists realized the form would enable them to explore large ideas as well — for example the human condition, politics, marriage.

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Next came the Modernists and as long as I’m indulging in assertions, how about this: they were hugely influences by what was going on in the visual arts (modernism, cubism) and as a result, writers started to think of novels as art. Writers approached novels as if they were a textual versions of Modernist paintings. Linear narrative was less important than evoking emotions or responses. Examples: Finnegan’s Wake, Virginia Woolf’s novels. Good times good times.

Then in the 20th century an industry grew on the shoulders of the early 20th century Modernists. The MA in Writing was born.

Novelists were no longer self-taught. The publishing industry hunted for degree’d “authors” who would uphold the Modernist ethos. Genre was sniffed at because it bypassed Modernism and continued to emphasize story, i.e. it viewed itself as entertainment and emphasized “spinning a good yarn.”

So the industry split. We had pulp and later mass market novels on the one hand and Literary Novels on the other. This is the state of affairs that B.R. Myers poked at in his 2002 Atlantic article, A Reader’s Manifesto.

But the end of the 20th Century also brought a couple other things. 1. The Entertainment Industry as we understand it today and 2. Shake-ups/disruption driven by the Internet and e-reader tech. The former influenced consumers’ tastes and entertainment preferences, and the latter disrupted the economic underpinnings of the publishing industry itself.

So publishers, their margins squeezed, shifted to a new hunt: Commercial fiction. Conceding that the vast majority of readers would prefer Dan Brown to yet another free associative Faulknerian clone.

Notice that today’s “how to be a successful novelist” industry teaches writers to create based on the architecture of commercially successful movies. I.e. the mechanics of “good” fiction is codified, more in more, in ways that are modeled on movies: structured as three acts, nadir at ¾ mark, driving the plot as beats, hero’s journey, etc.

So the question is: have we come full circle?

There are some fine novelists today spinning terrific yarns while also exploring large ideas. Off the top of my head: Ann Rice Interview with a Vampire (1976 early clue to the new direction) Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins.

So writers: if I’m correct, what does this mean for the future of genre? Perhaps this is why genre categories feel more fluid today than even 10 years ago? And what does this imply for Indie Authors who don’t care to write genre?

Can we write and self-publish breakout commercial fiction? Or will that remain impossible because the math to market to wide audiences is so crazy? (Because with genre, you can zero in on audience. With mainstream you are as @Alter_Space put it, a droplet lost in a tidal wave.)

Or as I think of it: Indies are trying to sell a P&G product on an Etsy budget.

So. Thoughts? Lamentations? Corrections? And let me know if you are an unpublished or Indie trying to play in the mainstream or literary fiction space…

Writing, seriously

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If you’re looking for a Serious Article about Serious Writing, here’s a dish served up by the Guardian [UPDATE, article gone, sorry]  from U.K. writer Zadie Smith.

Smith starts by asking why it’s so difficult to write a perfect novel. She doesn’t try to define “a perfect novel” however, and right off the bat dismisses critics, falling back instead on an assertion that writers aren’t ever satisfied with their own books, ergo, their books can’t be considered “perfect.” This dissatisfaction, she says, can be traced back to dissatisfaction with one’s ability to fully and truthfully capture “the truth of experience”:

There is a dream that haunts writers: the dream of the perfect novel. It is a dream that causes only chaos and misery. The dream of this perfect novel is really the dream of a perfect revelation of the self. In America, where the self is so neatly wedded to the social, their dream of the perfect novel is called “The Great American Novel” and requires the revelation of the soul of a nation, not just of a man … Still I think the principle is the same: on both sides of the Atlantic we dream of a novel that tells the truth of experience perfectly. Such a revelation is impossible – it will always be a partial vision, and even a partial vision is incredibly hard to achieve-

Hmmmmm.

Obviously this refers to literary novels, since a novel’s entertainment value plays no part in the equation. There’s no room here for the perfect “page turner” ha ha ha, nor for the sort of innocent reading my daughter enjoys, where she loves books for the pure pleasure of being lost in their pages.

Literary novels, on the contrary, are Serious; writing them is no less than a moral act, as per part 2 of the piece:

The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one … This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals.

A case of morals. Yeah. “I’m a writer, and I’ve come down with a baaad case of morals.”

Interestingly enough, there’s nothing really about craft / writing process in either of these lengthy piece’s two lengthy parts.

Maybe craft is assumed . . .

(RELATED: I’ve shared more thoughts on literary versus commercial/popular fiction here and here.)

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.

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?