J.D. Salinger said in 1974, “I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
When I first came to the USA having been marketing director of a successful publishing house in the UK, I attended a conference with the sales people at St. Martin’s Press and presented my first list of books to them. Their sales director seized on one of the novels I’d presented and told me that in order to sell it to Barnes and Noble, Borders and the like, the 20% of the American book trade that account of 80% of the business, given that there are so many books to present and each title gets only 30 seconds of the attention of these important buyers, it was necessary to say something along the lines of “This novel is a cross between The Great Gatsby and Breakfast at Tiffanys”.
Such stupidity, of course, I’d come across before. I’d been asked by similarly small-brained people in the UK questions like this before, e.g. “Which market is this book aimed at?”
I’d always been most uncomfortable with questions like that, and indeed, always shied away from them. As a marketing director, I’d always tried to think of myself as a reader and that basic discipline, which never left me, over the years has served me in good stead. If I look at the books on my own bookshelf, by this kind of thinking, which market, or markets am I in? And in the sense that it’s any help to someone trying to make books appeal to the likes of me, is it of any relevance?
One of the unexpected, unanticipated joys of fatherhood was in re-discovering the pleasure of reading children’s books. For example, on my shelf, one might find a book aimed at 7th graders, one for pre-nursery kids (I like the artwork and the innocence of the story), an early Spenser novel by Robert B Parker, some P.G. Wodehouse and the complete works of William Blake, W.B. Yeats, Carl Gustav Jung and James Joyce. How would one market to someone like that, someone who would read whatever takes his fancy, someone who is willing to buy a book on spec, and either be delighted and surprised that he liked it, or, that he didn’t, and that not liking it was OK too?
Clearly, there are areas in which writing for a market might make sense. For example, if one looks at Cookery, as a generic area of publishing, or book selling, a good bookstore would have a range of titles. There will be books which are introductory books on the subject, books to get a reader started on cooking and food, for obviously, in a subject like this, if the ingredients are substandard, the end result will be too. Then there will be books within sub-categories, such as generic cookery, Chinese, Indian, American, Italian etc etc, cooking for special diets, books about food and eating some of which were nicknames ‘scholars cookbooks’ in the trade. The best-selling books in this category are probably the introductory books to cooking, and this will be reinforced by going into somewhere like Costco and noting that they’ll have a couple of basic, all-color-all you need to know about cooking books. So if your desire is to make a lot of money and you want to write a cookery book, this is probably the best place to start for it will have more appeal than Cooking for Serbo-Croats.
Books are different to other products in certain key ways. If you are in the business of producing beer, for example, and you produce the worst beer in the history of beer making, it may not sell at the $4 price you first envisioned. But if you keep on reducing the price, at a certain point, you’ll be able to sell it, for notwithstanding such matters as flavor and how quickly you’ll get a massive headache from drinking it, there will be a price at which you can sell all you have. Books aren’t like that and if you come across Build Your Own Nuclear Reactor At Home, unless you are one of a very few, even if it’s on sale at 5 cents a copy, most people won’t buy it.
Some time ago, the venerable publishing company of Faber and Faber hired an idiot for a marketing director and among the gimmicks he thought up to sell books was a helicopter tour of the UK with their best poets on board. Seamus Heaney, later a Nobel Laureate and in this writer’s view, the greatest living poet in the English language, wouldn’t go. He said something along the lines of “I’d be in danger of gaining a market and losing my readers”.
Seamus speaks of his approach to creativity as trying to come at the truth from traces of it that are inside rather than from evidence gained methodically from outside, following a sixth sense, proceeding on the off chance, testing the ground by throwing a shape…. He talks of impulse discovering direction, potential discovering structure and chance becoming design - a movement I depend on, the only process I trust.
A publishing cliché says there are three types of writers, typists, who put words on a page, storytellers and real writers.
So write for markets if you must, but as Salinger said, the only question worth asking of a writer is, “Were most of your stars out?”
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