I made some comments over on Scott Dyson’s blog.  (Scott’s post is the genesis for these ideas.)  I’d like to amplify on them here and next week.  To summarize bluntly: reading in America is in trouble.  Maybe in the rest of the world too, but it’s clear that we’re in trouble here.  Let’s consider some numbers.

I’ve upped my presence on Goodreads lately.  Forget Facebook; Goodreads is where the readers are.  Authors too, but they’re second-class citizens for the GR team, and justifiably so.  My goal is to entertain readers.  To the extent that authors are also readers, I can entertain them too, but my goal is to reach out to readers.  (Warning to authors: All those writing groups you belong to won’t help you find readers.)

I can’t help but notice the numbers on Goodreads.  Three of the groups I belong too are huge!  Goodreads Authors/Readers has 21,534 members last I checked (why isn’t it Readers/Authors?); the Mystery, Crime, and Thriller Group has 12, 682; and the Sci-fi and Fantasy Book Club has 14,187.  Given that there’s probably some overlap (me, for example), those numbers represent a PR and marketing teams’ dream.  (Warning to them: PR and marketing efforts are frowned upon in GR and are generally relegated to only certain sections of a group’s list of discussions…and justifiably so.)

Now let’s do a completely silly calculation (I could refine it, but I’m lazy): Amazon, the biggest online book retailer, has 29,169,205 paperbacks, 10,773,442 hardbounds, and 2,570,070 ebooks the last time I checked.  Without considering genre (that’s where I could refine the calculation) and using just the ebooks (yeah, I know, there are many people that won’t use an ereader), that’s about 1475 ebooks for every member of that first GR group, assuming they all read different ones (they won’t of course—that’s one reason why GR exists: people recommend books to each other).

Of course, the above calculations represent a non-deceptive sophism, in spite of the seeming precision of the numbers.  First, that huge group on GR I belong to isn’t all the readers in America—they’re not even all of them on GR.  Plenty of readers don’t belong to GR, of course.  I imagine there are plenty of readers who aren’t on the internet even—those little mom-and-pop bookstores are selling books to someone.  But hold that thought: Amazon doesn’t sell all the books in the world either!  Maybe it all comes out in the wash, so whether the calculations are correct is a moot point: there are many readers but many more books.

Now I’m an avid reader.  In an average year, I read one book/week (mostly ebooks except for gifts from friends and relatives); that’s about 50 books per year, about 1425 short of making that 1475 number.  I could read more if I didn’t write.  For the purposes of this analysis, my writing is a distraction like the more common ones I consider below.  That’s probably true for most writers.  I also spend time reading AKA lurking, for the most part, in other blogs and discussion groups too, including the GR ones.

Let’s call this the demographics problem: there are more books and authors today than ever before, and there are fewer readers than ever before, and those readers read less (because of the distractions).  Maybe a better way to say it: The number of readers reading might be up, but the numbers of books and authors are increasing at a faster rate.  We’re a very literate society (scientists and engineers and sports jocks are exceptions, for the most part—at least that’s my experience), but that doesn’t imply everyone has the interest and patience to sit down and read a good book.  Most people are forced to read in HS and college—after that, they don’t have to, and they won’t if they think there’s something more entertaining to do.

If you don’t think there are other forms of entertainment, I want to know what parallel universe you’re living on.  From the internet to streaming video and traditional TV and movies, we have passive entertainment sources where very little reading is done (is a Twitter tweet literate?).  I’ve had people tell me that they don’t even watch the news because they find it too depressing.  Add to that the average person’s leisure activities (sports, concerts, protests, political rallies, comiccons, community service, church life, etc) and it’s clear we have a problem if any of these or all of them are preferred over reading.  Mr. Dyson pointed out that writers’ principal competitors are these other activities, not other writers.  If anything, they exacerbate the problem of being recognized as a writer, not just demographics.  Call this the distraction problem.

I’ve said this before in different ways, of course.  Today it’s hard to make a decent living as a writer, whether traditionally published or indie.  Too many of us are reduced to writing our books in a vacuum.  We might develop a loyal albeit not numerous fan base (as far as I know, I can count mine on my two hands), but a writer needs to sell thousands of books to make a decent living at this.  Some writers are doing so, both traditional and indie; most aren’t.  We’re all swimming upstream in a strong current.

I performed the following exercise last week: I googled “Steven M. Moore.”  I rarely do this because there are so many people with that same name—even deceased ones appear in a Google search.  But I wanted to check on how my little PR and marketing campaign is going for More than Human: The Mensa Contagion.  It was simple exercise: count the number of times it’s really me in those first five pages of search results and see how many refer to my new novel.  From the Google output, it’s doing about as well as expected.  Whether it translates into increased readership is dubious, though, from previous results and the fact that I have many more readers for this blog than I do for my ebooks.

One piece of evidence for this is found in my visitors to this blog (as opposed to hits).  The other was in that Google output: a blog post about writing was badly copied into a site for “trend setters.”  Of course, I encourage this—any post can be copied as long as I receive credit.  But that Google search item gave me pause.  I don’t want to be known as a blogger.  I prefer to be known as a novelist.  My goal is to entertain readers of mystery/suspense/thriller and sci-fi novels.  But maybe what the reading public wants nowadays is short, pithy, and easily digested news and discussions.  They don’t have time for anything else.

Please note that I don’t propose any solutions to these problems.  There probably aren’t any.  As usual, these are my opinions (except for the numbers above), so weigh in if yours are different.

[Next week: Part Two will continue this discussion.]

In libris libertas….

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2015 at 4:00 am and is filed under Education, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.