Every book in my lists of “Best Mysteries and Thrillers” and “Best Sci-Fi Books” (see my blog posts in the “Writing” category) is an “evergreen book.” What does that mean? It means they never grow old, whether they’re considered a “literary classic” or not. Of course, many literary classics are also evergreen (and some classics are just terrible reading for most readers today).

But evergreen books in the sense that they’re still wonderful books to read, even if they were published a while ago, form a much larger class than best books in a genre or literary classics. Many early books in an author’s oeuvre are evergreen. Unfortunately bookstores and online book merchants prefer to market recent books over evergreen books, thus depriving readers of good books to read and authors of those books readership and royalties. The smaller the bookstore, the more likely this is done. That’s a stocking or warehousing problem essentially. The online merchants like Amazon and Smashwords have no excuse; they have all the space in the world. The reader can find evergreen books there, but they have to know the title and author. (Titles aren’t copyrightable, so you observe the same or similar titles used over many decades.)

Thirty out of thirty-five books listed on my “Steve’s Bookshelf” web page under “Fiction” and “Stealth Reads” are evergreen. The non-fiction books there tend to be more topical and recent, important now, but maybe not future evergreen books. All these books are ones that have really impressed me, for whatever reason, which points out that which books are considered evergreen might differ from reader to reader. Still, when an author declares a book is evergreen, it must bear a little weight, and readers should consider them. (Note: Not all books in my lists of “best books” are on my bookshelf page. There’s just not enough room, and I wanted to get those “Stealth Reads” on that web page.)

While two recent books of mine, Mind Games and The Last Humans, were published this year (2019), I published my first book Full Medical in 2006. It’s an evergreen book because it’s as current today as when it was published, maybe even more so, because it deals with cloning as a nefarious solution to the lack of organs to transplant. I’ve published a few books per year since then. Everyone of them is evergreen except for those 2019 books, which are just “new.”

The “review circus” keeps many evergreen books from popping up on online sites. Unless a book has 25+ reviews, Amazon ignores it, and, of course, Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, doesn’t count reviews posted anywhere else! Amazon mitigates this somewhat by sometimes popping up books that are selling well, even if they don’t sell well. Smashwords pop-ups are only determined by the latter. Any intelligent person can see what a vicious circle this is: pop-ups and other promos will draw customers to books, but they pop up only if many other customers were already drawn to them by some other means.

On my Amazon author page, titles are listed in order of sales, not reviews, although publication date is also weighted somehow (only the bots know the formula). Smashwords simply lists them in reverse chronological order of publication. The first is that vicious circle again; the second makes evergreen books less visible.

Book marketing in bookstores and online conspires against evergreen books. Savvy readers know that and go looking for them, on the author’s online author pages, in used bookstores, and in public libraries. Be a savvy reader. You’ll be surprised at what you can find among those evergreen books.

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Comments are always welcome.

Mind Games. You know A. B. Carolan as the writer of The Secret Lab and The Secret of the Urns. Those novels are sci-fi mysteries for young adults (and adults who are young at heart). In Mind Games, A. B. tells a new story that’s set a bit farther into the future than his first two books. Della Dos Toros is a young girl with psi powers living in the Dark Domes of the planet Sanctuary. Her adopted father doesn’t let her use those powers, but she must do so to find his killer. This story about ESP and androids adds another action-packed novel to the ABC Sci-Fi Mystery series. Available in both print and ebook versions.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 21st, 2019 at 3:32 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.