The Olympics of Publishing
Like much of the world, I’ve spent a good part of the last week watching the Olympics. Unlike much of the world, I’ve been forced to spend most of that time watching swimming, gymnastics, and beach volleyball. They’re all fine, of course, up to a point. But after a while I get tired of seeing people swimming laps and flying through the air.
I complained about it to my friend, who lives in Germany. Her response? “Thank goodness I’m not in the States - we get to see all the weird stuff like trampoline and handball!”
Since then I did manage to see trampoline. For three minutes.
NBC showed us a few moments (few being the important word here) of pole vaulting the other night. They got us to the top two, said the athletes would be competing for the gold, and promptly went off to something else, so we never did get to see the finals. Sprinting, it seems, is much more important.
A sampling of a few sports other than the Chosen Few:
Table tennis
Kayaking
Badminton
Equestrian
Archery
Fencing
Sailing
Baseball
Softball
Tennis
Judo…
And many others.
Granted, I probably wouldn’t want to see a lot of these for hours on end, but it would be nice to see some once in a while.
This whole thing has got me thinking, of course, of the publishing industry, and how there are the special Chosen Few, and the NBC-types who think they know what people want to read. Which, of course, are all sexy thrillers. Isn’t that all you ever want to read?
When I had the opportunity to talk with Dan Mayer, the Barnes and Noble book buyer earlier this spring when our Sisters in Crime Publishers Summit went to NYC, he had a lot of interesting things to say about what publishers think people want to read.
First, when offered the publishers’ opinion that cozies are dead, he scoffed (yes, really!) at the idea. Cozies sell better than most other mysteries, he told us. People love cozies, and they love series. When new books come out, people want the backlist, and that keeps cozies in print.
Second, he made no bones about the fact that he’s sick of noir. At least, bad noir. If he saw one more black-and-white, out of focus cover of a city street he was going to scream, he said. Personally, I wouldn’t want to test the theory.
Finally, we told him that publishers had said they want their mysteries sold in the fiction section. That they sell much better there. He didn’t scoff at this – instead, he got a little annoyed. Being the book buyer, and therefore the person who actually sees what needs to be bought, he can see that mysteries actually sell much better when they’re in the – believe it or not – mystery section. The idea of selling them in the straight fiction seemed, to him, to be quite silly.
So why is it that publishers (and NBC) think so little of their audiences? To assume that we have such a low tolerance for, and acceptance of, something other than what they perceive to be the Huge Names and the same old thing? Is it, perhaps, their reliance on Huge Names, and their preference for them, that keep them Huge? And keep the discerning consumer frustrated?
With my own books a little off the beaten track, it was hard selling them at first. It’s still not easy. But I did get a little perk from Booklist for Different Paths, the Stella Crown book coming out next month. “Stella Crown is a wonderful, if unusual, addition to the amateur-detective ranks…This unique series deserves a much larger audience and more recognition.”
A plug for my books being something different from the norm, and saying that that’s good.
From Booklist’s columns to the industries ears? Probably not. But at least it’s a start.
