Drawing the wrong lessons

The market for books is weirdly open and weirdly opaque, both at the same time.

It’s open in the sense that you can walk into a bookshop and see which books are being heavily promoted (front of store, price discounted), which books are being merely sold (round the side of the store, spines out), and which books – too often your own – aren’t being sold at all.

You can also pick up any book to get a rough measure as to critical acclaim and any sales records the book may have. On Amazon, you can go one better and get an actual sales rank, brought up to date every hour.

It’s really easy to get captured by these things. “So-and-So’s Book X is doing really well, so I should make mine more like that.” “Famous Author Y always writes along these particular lines, so I should do the same.”

But those conclusions are dangerous and often completely misleading. So, to mention just a few issues:

1. A book may have pride of place on a bookstore’s sales table, simply because a publisher has paid for it to be there. The book may be selling badly and be actively loss-making and be generating despondent “where did we go wrong?” type meetings at the publisher.
   
   
2. A book may become a bestseller, simply because enough supermarkets have bought and then discounted the title. Those supermarkets have the sales power to create a bestseller – footfall is the single most potent sales tool there is – but the retail buyers making the acquisition probably never read the book before buying it. So, what you’re looking at is not much more than a random effect. (That said, you do probably need to have sold your novel to a Big 5 house, via an agent, even to place a stake at that particular roulette table – so in that sense, it’s very not random.)
   
   
3. Amazon sales rankings are hugely responsive to quite small changes in sales. So, for a book to gain or lose 10,000 places in a day is common. For books with lower sales, a shift of 100,000 places may well signify extremely little in practice.
   
   
4. Critical acclaim can be carefully manufactured by a publisher. That and sales outcomes are two very different things and in most cases publishers will only care about the latter. And critical comments are very carefully culled. An ambivalent piece with a single strikingly positive phrase will be clipped down to that phrase alone. Additionally, by the time a consensus builds, critics are nervous to do their job. So, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro is obviously a terrific novelist… but it’s also obvious that his Dark Ages novel, The Buried Giant, is kinda awful. No one ever dared say so, though.
   
   
5. A US bestseller can flunk in the UK and vice versa. People often try to analyse what it is about US tastes that differ so much from UK tastes – but a big point here is that outcomes in traditional publishing have a large component of pure, random luck. I’d say a really strong title matters. And no book becomes a lasting bestseller unless it has some genuine merit. But plenty of good books flunk. If your title is bought by the US and the UK, then great: you get a seat at both roulette tables. But the spins are separate and outcomes are only weakly correlated.
   
   
6. A book that does amazingly well online may never find any meaningful print sales at all. I can think of a UK crime author whose digital sales (via a digital publisher) ran very quickly into seven figures. A print deal soon followed, and it was assumed at the time of signing that a big print bestseller was the natural outcome. But it wasn’t. The print book did OK, but it was nothing like the runaway success of the digital one.
   
   
7. A famous author doing very well at his/her game may not mean anything at all about whether that particular market is a good one for you. So, let’s say that you notice a new Dan Brown or John Grisham novel making headlines and grabbing sales slots. You might think that producing weirdly written novels about secret codes is a good game to get into – or that the world badly needs another legal thriller. But the point is that DB / JG have now created their own genres: people who like Dan Brown / John Grisham books. The JG reader may well read no other legal thrillers and certainly not be desperate to find new authors in that niche. You essentially can’t tell anything at all from the current sales history of more established authors.

So, what do you do? How are you meant to navigate?

One piece of advice – widely offered – is just to write to please yourself. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s foolish. Yes, you need to please yourself. And yes, you need to find joy and satisfaction and meaning in what you write. But you also need to make sure that there’s a market for what you write. Opaque as the books market is, you do still need to interrogate it for whatever lessons you can learn.

Here are some rules which are, I think, dependable.

Look at recent debuts. The books that are making their debuts today are books that were acquired by publishers (roughly) 12-18 months ago. Without being a literary agent, you can’t know much about more recent market activity, so those debuts are your best bet. Don’t just look at the promotional chatter about those books. Try, if you can, to find any data on whether the books are considered to have sold well. If a publisher bought a book 15 months ago and is making good money from it today, it’ll want another book in the same broad genre.

Know your genre. The best – really, the only – way to understand movements in the market for your genre is to participate fully in that genre, as reader. To consider the whole romantasy genre, for instance – to understand what’s ‘current’ there – means reading widely in the genre. I’m not a big fan of slutty faeries, so my guess as to what to write in that genre would offer absolutely nothing by way of insight. But if you read what others are reading, then the book you want to read next is probably the one you want to write. You’ve effectively turned yourself into the Ideal Reader for your novel.

Don’t just think about your genre. If psych thrillers are doing really well commercially, then your historical espionage novel with an unreliable narrator fits into the same broad cultural trend.

So read widely. Pay particular attention to recent successful debuts. Read in your genre and out of it. Write what you love – and what there’s a market for.

And?

And don’t be seduced by shiny chatter and sales blurbs. Those things deceive as often as they inform – and actually, probably, a lot more often.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The big random thumb

OK, I don’t want to know if you have a shiny opening to your book, or if your battle scene is great. This week we’re going to do the Big Random Thumb. Basically: does your book look strong enough when we just search out a perfectly average passage? Is there something there to convince a reader that you’re worth trusting?

Give me page 42 from your manuscript. If you want to jiggle the start a little bit in order to find a chunk that has some coherence out-of-context, then fine. But not much jiggling – the less, the better. Page 41 or 43, if you don’t want to start at page 42.

250 words total, please. As usual, title, genre, and a line or two of explanation. I’ll pop my own page 42 sample up on Townhouse too, so you can take a look at what the Big Random Thumb finds with me.

When you’re ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

Til soon.

Harry