Maybe the reason the book business has been on such shaky ground is that books make people feel stupid.
Really. Think about it. It seems like every other book I pick up these days has the words, “A NOVEL” plastered on it. Really. You don’t say? The book about a vigilante vampire seeking revenge against the heirs of the person who bit him and made him undead is a novel? I thought maybe a cookbook, or some sort of genealogy reference book. Fiction? Boy do I feel dumb.
Okay, so that’s a little pet peeve of mine, but it’s actually really little in the grand scheme of things. I’m starting to develop a much bigger pet peeve. I’ve vacillated on this in the past, but when it comes to bookstores and methods of sale and promotion, I’m a segregationist. I like labels, because they can help me readily find what it is I’m looking for. It all goes back to when I was looking for books, trying to find authors I liked, and I bought some novels that were out on display. I didn’t finish a single one of them. At that point, I thought about the types of TV shows I liked to watch, went to the mystery section, and discovered authors who could hook me book after book.
Here’s the problem, for me. Nowadays, it seems like people are trying so hard to make their work fit in one of the popular boxes, that everything is a thriller. I don’t think of my own books as thrillers. Well, WHAT BURNS WITHIN qualifies, but first and foremost, the books are police procedurals. You know, some of of us like police procedurals. Why is it such a no-no to promote a series with that label?
And the other big selling phrase is noir. I suppose all you need to do is have a noir thriller to have all your bases covered.
The reason I’m starting to develop a dislike for all this sub-sub-genre labeling is that it’s often misleading, at best. We can argue until the end of time about what noir is, and there will never be universal agreement. The risk of irritating readers with false expectations is there, though.
See, I like how Shakespeare’s works were labeled. If it was a comedy you knew it was supposed to be funny, and if it was a tragedy you knew pretty much everyone you liked would be dead by the end. No false expectations or delusions.
These days, we’ve got series books labeled as noir – enough to offend noir traditional definition purists right off the bat. For other titles, if over the course of the book there are references to a couple people who were stabbed to death twenty years earlier, it’s earned the noir stamp.
You don’t even want to get me started on the definitions of thrillers. I wrestled with that last year until I was cross-eyed.
I like labels, but I don’t like it when the labels aren’t correct.
There are a lot of people who pick up a book, love it, don’t really know much about genre and sub-genre labels, but want to have the same experience by picking up a similar book. Years back, before I was writing adult fiction, I did that by following the author. But wouldn’t it be nice if people could actually look at the category of a book and know that another book with the same category will be similar? But how can that happen when books that aren’t thrillers get slapped with that label
I think this is why James Patterson has his own section in the bookstores (at least, Chapters/Indigo stores in Canada) and this is why tie-in books for CSI and such sell like hotcakes. People know what they’re getting. They aren’t setting themselves up for disappointment, or taking a chance.
There may be a silver lining. Much to my amazement, we’re seeing more books labeled, “A Mystery.” Maybe that means that mysteries are now in, or maybe it means that somebody, somewhere, figured out that not everyone goes to the store for noir, and not everyone goes for a thriller, and some people actually like knowing what they’re getting when they buy a book. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’ve gotten to the point where I try not to read any of the promotional information about a book anymore. Invariably, there’ll be these snappy little phrases sprinkled throughout, and more often than not I find them turning me off rather than intriguing me. In my case, that’s because I often have reason to doubt whether the book is “Historical Noir”.
I’m not knocking anyone for doing what they can to try to promote their book. I get it. But I think maybe, just maybe, we’re all missing the point. I keep going back to why Patterson and Grisham and Dan Brown make millions and why other authors struggle to stay in print. And I think it’s because when you pick up their books, you know exactly what you’re getting. No false expectations.
So, if you want my 2 cents, it’s to make sure that if you get the chance to brand yourself, that you do it accurately. If people know exactly what they’re getting it’ll help your target audience find you. And, like the independents who really decide the outcome of elections, there are enough avid readers who will reach across a genre line, or a sub-genre line, when they hear good things. If you get your core readers enthused, the rest will follow, but like I said, you can’t find your core if you’re too busy trying to sell the book to someone else.
It’s interesting that it’s Patterson, Grisham and Dan Brown, but Scott Turow isn’t on the list. Now, twenty-five yeas after he defined the “courtroom thriller” with “Presumed Innocent,” he finally has the sequal out called “Innocent.” He probably could have written twenty-four more Rusty Sabich books but he didn’t.
Not every writer wants to write books that allow people to know before reading them exactly what they’re getting. Just like not all readers want to get exactly what they expect.
Sure, it’s a minority and you won’t sell as many books as Grisham and Patterson but that’s not everyone’s goal.
When it comes to the labelling, I like the comparison to TV. Someone said the other day, “People read for entertainment,” and I thought that for the first time we now look at TV and books the same way – there’s enough diversity and rnge in both that some are disposable entertainment and some are The Wire.
But this is new. It’s new for TV to be treated so seriously and new for books to not be the top of the cultural heap. Sometimes I find myself telling my kids to put down that silly book and come watch this great show on TV. My parents certainly never said that to me
I’m sure there are plenty of others I could have mentioned, John! And you’re right, there are some who don’t want that labeling… I actually love that your latest is branded “A Crime Novel”. At least that points a person in the right direction.
When I was reading for the ITW awards last year I went half mental trying to deal with the labels. And it is kind of odd to see books labeled ‘A Mystery’ submitted for a thriller award. I know a few years ago there was a big fight online when someone accused the ITW of being sexist, but it generated a lot of discussion about what thrillers are, and aren’t. I read some great books I really enjoyed for the awards, but rated them NAT because they weren’t thrillers.
I think people don’t feel as stressed about labeling TV because you can sample 5, 10, 15 minutes of it and you’ve only lost time. People buy books, or take them out from the library, and I worked in a library a few years ago. There are definitely people who’ll sign a book out and come back two hours later, upset over a wasted trip because the book wasn’t what they wanted or expected. With committed readers there’s less to worry about, but with fringe readers it could be harder to get the next book in their hands. And we seem to have a lot of fringe readers these days…
Yeah, the sampling is interesting. I wonder how giving away chapters online will affect all this. Since I’ve had the Kindle app on my iPod I’ve read the beginning of a few books and ended up buying some and not others.
I still think the biggest change we’ll see in publishing isn’t the e-book as much as the e-distribution. Since I started buying most of my books online the, “If you like this, you may also like this,” and the “frequently bought together,” have surprised me in their accuracy. My wife jokes that Amazon knows her better than I do.
But as that software gets even more sophisticated and the tags get more detailed the labelling will get a lot more specific.
Oh, and I didn’t think Scott Turow was missing from your list, he’s handled his career quite differently from those other guys and doesn’t really belong on the same list. If he had followed up “Presumed Innocent” right away with more Rusty Sabich books he’d be on the list for sure, but he decided not to, which I think is interesting.