Hildegarde

I wanted to get back to the idea that the only way to increase the sales of novels would be to increase the number of people who love to read, preferably by changing something we do in schools so that more people would develop a passion for it.

And I still think this is wrongheaded–not only do  I not think schools are capable of increasing the numbers of such people, I think trying to sell books only to such people is what we’re doing now, and it’s failing abysmally.

And then I remembered Oprah’s  book club.

I have no idea if Oprah is still doing this–I’ll admit it, I’ve never watched an entire Oprah Winfrey show–but I do know that when she was doing the  club, any book chosen for it sold like crazy, and it was the only one of that author’s books that sold.

I’m putting that in italics for a reason.  The publishing industry is used to a particular kind of dynamic between writers and readers.  Readers who find a book they like go looking for anything else that author has written.  They buy the next book by the same author when it comes out.

If you think about readers you know, about the ones you encounter on  Internet discussion lists, you’ll notice a real tendency to speak in sentences like “I’m reading the new  Lee Child” or “Linda Barnes has something coming out and I’ve got to have it.”

Readers who love reading read writers, not books.  It’s much the same with people who are really passionate about film, or even about a particular movie star.   They don’t go to see the movie so much as they go to see the work of that director or the appearance of that star. 

But if nobody comes to the movie except the people who are passionate about directors or stars, the movie isn’t going to do all that well, because those people–yes, even the ones obsessed with stars–are a minority among the viewing public.

Movies get successful by bringing in people who seldom go to movies.  They are there for the movie, for that particular plot and those particular characters.  If the same director and the same stars put out another movie next month on a topic these people are not much interested in, they won’t bother to go.

What Oprah did was to market books to people who don’t usually read books.  They were there for the book, not for the love of reading or for an author, but for that particular work and what it had to offer.

Publishing, however, virtually never markets books to this kind of reader.  They stick to the people who love books already, to the readers who read writers (or sometimes genres) rather than books.

And those people are a minority audience for any work of art or entertainment.

There are three hundred million people in the United States of  America.  There are fifty thousand readers for any book at all.   What there aren’t are fifty thousand readers who read  because they love reading for any book.

People don’t go to the movies because schools teach them that there are lots of different kinds of movies out there, some of which they will love.

They go to the movies because people around them go to the movies and somebody took them once and they got used to the idea.  

The same with video games and popular music.

If books are going to sell in reasonable numbers to keep writers afloat as writers, then the publishers have to learn how to sell them to people who will read only one book this year, or maybe two. 

And publishers seem to have absolutely no clue as to how to do this. 

The  Oprah effect was real enough, but unfortunately it can’t be duplicated exactly.  People read the books in Oprah’s book club because they liked and admired Oprah–in fact, for the very same reason people go to movies or listen to various kinds of music.

The traditional methods of publicizing books and drawing an audience all seem not to work very well.  Book signings draw only people who already like that particular author, and sometimes they don’t even draw those.  I’ve seen major names in the genre draw almost nobody to book signings–and by their very nature, book signings are an exampe of preaching to the converted.

So aremost book tours, unless they can get unusual media coverage–that is, coverage on something besides the book page or the book segment of a radio or television program already pegged as the “booky” one.

What bothers me is not so much that we aren’t reacing the nonreader reader yet, but that we aren’t even trying.   And when we talk about selling books, or finding an audience for them, we never consider that part of the potential audience. 

It’s always all or nothing, people who love reading and nobody else.

There have got to be ways of reaching the wider audience.

Trying to do it through schools hasn’t worked yet, and never will, because it’s the answer to the wrong question.

The issue isn’t how to make more people love to read.  The issue is how to get people who don’t love to read to realize that they’d really love reading that particular book.