Tag Archives: writing

Some thoughts on potential. Market potential.

Posted on by

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.

Why they say “no”

Posted on by

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.

Another lit agent blogging: Rachel Vater

Posted on by

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.

OK, now I get the “no attachments” thing

Posted on by

I’ve always assumed the reason agents automatically reject e-queries that arrive with attachments is the threat of viruses.

But look at what writers send to Wylie-Merrick.

Writers send us e-mail attachments with nothing else in the body of the e-mail message.

Writers send us e-mail attachments with a note in the body of the message telling us that the query is in the attachment. We have never quite understood this one.

Writers send us e-mail attachments that include pictures of themselves, their children, their pets, and sometimes their illustrations.

Here’s the thing. Any agent who’s any good has no shortage of prospective writers he/she could sign. Why bother with people who can’t even send an email without creating unnecessary work for the agent?

Let alone emailing photos of the kids.

I’d delete them unread, too.

Reading through feminist eyes

Posted on by

Okay, when I first caught wind of the This is Chick Lit vs. This is Not Chick Lit controversy, I thought it was a matter of highbrow vs. lowbrow novels. Obviously I was wrong. It’s about who’s being the better feminist.

What Elizabeth Merrick’s anti-chick lit camp argues is that serious female writers are getting shorted. Their books don’t receive equal attention by the [presumably — I’m restating what I gather is the argument here, haven’t fact-checked] male-dominated publishing industry and [presumably] male-dominated book-review industry (limited, for the purpose of this battle, to the venues that most matter in the literary world, e.g. The NYT Book Review).

And now, into this sad situation, introduce a glut of lite novels with pink covers that quickly begin sucking the air out of bookstores and the dollars out of female readers’ purses.

So what does Merrick want for her writers?

Money?

According to a citation of The Top 10 of Everything by Russell Ash (found originally on The University of Michigan’s Internet Public Library but page now deep-sixed), of the top ten bestselling books of all time, only one is a novel: The Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann, comes in at #9.

Of the thirteen other novels Ash lists as having sold at least 10,000,000 copies worldwide, another four are by women (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds, Grace Metalious, Peyton Place, Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind). Granted, five out of 14 isn’t quite 50 percent, but the list cited by the (now defunct) website is also nearly 10 years old — it predates J.K. Rowling, for instance.

According to Guinness World Records, the best-selling fiction writer of all time is Agatha Christie.

A quick peruse of author names on the the top selling books by year linked here suggests that men have edged out women by about 2:1 over the past several years. But this seeming disparity may have an innocuous explanation: it may be that the pool of male readers concentrates on fewer novels. From Writers Digest:

The books men do purchase tend to be purchased on brand. Brand loyalty, [Pages editor John] Hogan says, is especially important to the male book buyer — the brand being a recognizable name like Harlan Coben or Scott Turow. This makes it more difficult for an unknown author geared toward a male audience to get recognized.

So maybe the only thing hindering woman from achieving parity on the yearly bestseller lists is the reading inclinations of men — something that also makes it hard for aspiring male writers to dislodge a Grisham or Turow. This may also explain why men perhaps read fewer female writers than vice versa, as well as why bestseller lists skew toward male novelists, even though the majority of novel readers are probably female.

Women are simply more adventurous book buyers ;-)

That’s commercial fiction. But what about literary fiction?

Or put another way: if money isn’t the problem, what is?

Recognition?

I dunno. If that were the case, then the issue must be that women writers aren’t being taken seriously by (for the sake of simplification) male reviewers.

So what?

A good friend of mine who acts as an occasional reader of my manuscripts declined to read my last one. The premise didn’t grab her — it wasn’t a match for her sensibilities.

That’s not a problem. I don’t expect everyone to get excited by my books’ premises. I certainly don’t expect many men to! lol

So what?

So what?

And who are you writing for, btw?

Update: none of the best-selling books by women made the Snarkling Reading List, for what that’s worth…

On agency

Posted on by

Diana Peterfreund has a thought-provoking post on her blog about characterization and agency — in the sense of acting or exerting power. She writes, in part:

When you have a very normal character in a very extraordinary situation, there is a strong temptation to just let things happen to her. Let her be swept along in the tide of all the extraordinary things. Let the extraordinary people around her start making her decisions for her. I guess it works, but for my money, the really unforgettable stories are when the ordinary person overcomes these forces and makes decisions for herself. Maybe they’re the wrong decision, but at least they’re decisions.

She also makes an observation about the protagonists of Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland: Dorothy exhibits agency; Alice does not.

Another layer of interest to that comparison is that at the end of Alice in Wonderland, it’s revealed that the adventures were a dream. Alice was therefore de facto cast as a passive observer, the dreaming self, or perhaps even more precisely the waking self observing the dreaming self.

(Not that dreams must always be experienced passively; I often alter mine, sometimes scripting whole storylines — an experience very close to that of writing fiction, incidentally.)

From my blogroll: Language Log, again

Posted on by

Had too much fun reading this morning to write a blog post myself.

Over at Pubrants, agent Kristin Nelson has posted a query from one of her writers, Lisa Shearin, along with comments about what it was about the query that worked. Nice contrast to Evil Editor, whose material is drawn from queries that don’t work quite so well.

I’ve also been looking through the archives at Language Log, a blog I added to my blogroll yesterday after my eggcorn post. What a pleasure. I love the ‘net!

UPDATE: Mark Liberman has collaborated with Geoffrey K. Pullum to publish a “best of” Language Log as a book, Far from the Madding Gerund :)

Eggcorns, hooray!!!

Posted on by

Here’s a fun read: Mark Peters in The Chronicle of Higher Education, writing about eggcorns.

So what’s an eggcorn? Originally, the word “eggcorn” was just an amusing misspelling of “acorn.” Linguists — especially those on the Language Log blog — noticed that “eggcorn” made a kind of intuitive sense and was an apt guess if you didn’t know the real spelling.

. . . All eggcorns makes sense on some level. For example, the eggcorn “girdle one’s loins” is far more understandable than the archaic “gird one’s loins.” “Free reign” — an extremely common misspelling — expresses a similar laxness to “free rein,” and there’s a kind of exclamatory kismet between “whoa is me!” and “woe is me!” Another eggcorn, “woeth me!” makes an old-fashioned-sounding word even more so. And since a rabble-rouser may eventually cause some rubble to exist, “rubble-rouser” is a nifty invention.

Lots more examples in the article, plus the delightful revelation that one Chris Waigl has an Eggcorn Database.

I know a fellow who used to coin them on purpose. Two of my favorites: “get to the crux of the biscuit” and “low dog on the scrotum pole” :-D

The great divide

Posted on by

I haven’t been reading much nonfiction lately (although my dad has given a copy of Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf by Ben Hogan, which I’ll be looking at after work today, lol) but The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine sounds way too interesting to pass up:

“The Female Brain” weaves together more than 1,000 scientific studies from the fields of genetics, molecular neuroscience, fetal and pediatric endocrinology, and neurohormonal development. It is also significantly based on her own clinical work at the Women’s and Teen Girls’ Mood and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF 12 years ago. It is the only psychiatric facility in the country with such a comprehensive focus.

Although I’m wary of over-intellectualizing my fiction writing, I have another motive besides straight curiosity for my interest in the book: in my current WIP I’ve moved to third person, so instead of a first-person female narrator observing men (something I’ve spent some time researching, ha ha) I’m going to have to hover a bit within a man’s head — oooh, scary!

(Or maybe not. According to the article on Brizendine’s book, “Thoughts about sex enter women’s brains once every couple of days; for men, thoughts about sex occur every minute.” So to make my guy authentic, all I need to do is have him think about sex all the time! How hard can that be? :-D)

You’ve probably also caught the AP story on the recent RWA conference by Kate Brumback, which reports that a growing percentage of romance readers are male (22 percent in 2004, up from from 7 percent in 2002).

That article includes a bit about Don’t Look Down, the “military romance” collaboration between Jennifer Crusie and former Green Beret Bob Mayer.

I read the book on Friday (staying up until waaaay past my bedtime to finish it btw — when will I learn?) If you want to write commercial fiction, this is a great book to mull over — the characters are so quickly drawn, the pacing triptrops along–and then there’s the link-up between Lucy & J.T., crafted with its built-in reality check:

Mayer and Crusie met at the Maui Writers Conference three years ago. Both were looking to do something different, and they decided to collaborate. Crusie writes the parts that come from a woman’s point of view, while Mayer weighs in with the male perspective.

“Usually, you have women writing the male point of view, too. I read some sometimes and go, ‘No, that’s not what the guy is really thinking,’ ” Mayer said.

“He’s actually thinking about sex.” ha ha ha Mayer didn’t really say that :-)

I plan to read the book a second time as a writer, just to pick apart the male female stuff. For example, when the narrative follows Lucy, that’s how she’s referenced — by her first name. When it follows J.T., he’s referenced by Wilder, his last name — the only time he’s called “J.T.” is in dialogue, or when Lucy is thinking about him. It’s a subtle thing but it alone really masculinizes his piece of the story. How cool is that?