#241: Who’s the reader?  I’ve heard that 60% of readers are women.  I suspect that percentage goes down if we eliminate genres like romance and erotica or combinations like vampire-horror-erotica.  Still, authors better not ignore women readers just like politicians better not ignore women voters (authors probably commit that sin much less than politicians).

Another class of readers I’d like to know more about is baby boomers, maybe distinguishing between retired and not-retired.  Presumably, retirees have more time to read than working stiffs.  I think it’s a myth that everybody retires to play golf or tennis.  I count many ex-colleagues who are readers.  I don’t know what percentage of all readers are retirees, or boomers.  You’d think traditional publishing would do something useful for once and determine these statistics.

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#235: Strong and smart female protagonists revisited.  While I’m sure all readers will like DHS profiler and analyst Ashley Scott and her older friend, ex-FBI agent Virginia Morgan, in my recently released The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, female readers might also identify with some of the lifetime issues these two women face.  The two women have different solutions for these middle-agers’ problems.  Ashley, for example, once divorced and quite independent (for example, Ashley resents her daughter Jacky’s opinion that she is a doddering old biddy when she turns fifty), doesn’t know if she needs a man in her life or not and certainly doesn’t want to just settle for someone comfortable.  These, of course, are all subthemes as the reader plows through a lot of action and suspense.

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Readers of this blog know that I’ve long supported drones and special forces as effective ways to battle terrorism.  Now these tactics are coming into question in the liberal media.  The criticism contains the usual complaint that innocents can be killed.  It also complains about due process, especially for those terrorists who are also U.S. citizens.  The Obama administration has recognized the effectiveness of these policies.  Ironically, both sides of the political aisle are criticizing.  Maybe not ironic, but absurd—it’s as if all those NRA supporters in Congress have suddenly become vocal sycophants of the ACLU.

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There are many wonderful things about ebook self-publishing that make it attractive to writers.  An obvious one that comes to mind is that the writer can minimize what stands between him and the reader.  I’m talking logistics, of course, as well as time delay.  One can consider a situation where event X occurs in the real world and there’s an ebook about it only a few weeks later.  After finishing a manuscript (MS), the delay needed to reach the reading public is minimal.

In fact, readers rule in this entertainment industry.  As a consequence, an author has to realize that every reader is different.  Whether a book becomes a bookseller because of some lemming-like mass psychosis (the Fifty Shades trilogy comes to mind), or because it was released at the right place and right time (Harry Potter comes to mind), or is the best literary offering since To Kill a Mockingbird (no recent book comes to mind), the reading public are the consumers who determine the success of a book.  Any author who tries to predict the future and bend with the stormy winds of literary fashion is crazy.  Writers should write the stories that come from the core of their creative being—if they resonate with readers, that only means that other people enjoy his stories.  This is where minimizing steps between writer and reader come in.

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#232: Follow-up about Amazon reviews.  For more evidence that Amazon reviews in general represent meaningless information for potential book buyers (for more, see my three-part series a few weeks ago), consider the treatment Randall Sullivan’s Untouchable, a bio of Michael Jackson, recently received.  According to the NY Times, a group called Michael Jackson’s Response Team to Media Attacks wrote enough one-star reviews to knock the book off Amazon.  Whether you call this free speech or bullying, this is reprehensible action by this group.

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