I've always wanted to write a book, and think I've "got one in me" because I'm arrogant like that, but when you say so many novelists can't make a living, one has to wonder - if that is true, and I have no reason to disbelieve you - how do useless cunts like Dan Brown and James Patterson earn a living via the literary drivel they churn out?
Is it marketing? Luck? Connections?
Obviously Patterson had a whole cadre of advertising and media chums to plug his shite via his old "day job", and he also had an expert insight on what "sells", but Christ almighty, his books are shite.
Well, Patterson and Brown are in the 0.1% who make a living because lots of people buy their books. That sounds like a glib answer, I know, but it really is as simple as that.
Now, as to WHY lots of people buy their books... That's a question that requires a somewhat longer answer. The truth is that the average reader doesn't devote much time to reading. I don't know the exact figures but I'd be surprised if the average person reads more than ten books a year. Books aren't a huge part of their lives - they just don't care all that much. So their primary criteria for choosing a book are recommendation by friends, brand recognition and market visibility... This last one is key: people pick the fruit of the best-seller tree and don't often forage any deeper.
So best-sellers are best-sellers because they're best-sellers! Gotta love that!
That part of it is all down to marketing: a successful book rarely has anything to do with the quality of the writing or the storytelling, because success is judged on sales and the sales are almost entirely the product of the skills of the publicity department.
In many cases the publishers decide in advance which books will be their best-sellers. To make a book a best-seller the publishers offer quantity-based discounts to the big bookstore chains (seventy or even eighty per cent isn't unheard of), and on top of that they buy prime shelf-space to ensure maximum visibility: those big window displays of the latest best-sellers in your local bookstore don't come cheap!
Sometimes a book will break through on its own, but this really only happens maybe once a year.
The Da Vinci Code is a textbook example: its initial sales were about average, but somehow it caught the public imagination and people started talking about it. The publishers capitalised on this and started pushing it like crazy. Pretty soon everyone was buying it to see what the fuss was about.
It's possible for a publisher to deliberately ignite the public interest, but it's a very unpredictable science. One Big Name publisher (who shall
remain nameless) recently paid a huge advance - seven figures in UK money - to a new author for a three-book contract, and they used that as the focus of their publicity campaign: "Look at how much money we're giving this author! That just shows you how much confidence we have in the books!" When the first book was published the author was interviewed dozens of times on prime-time TV, radio, top newspapers... The sort of blanket coverage of which every author dreams. Unfortunately, all the interviews focussed on the impressive advance and pretty much ignored the books.
The books themselves - while certainly not terrible - were nothing particularly special and sales were only slightly above average. So the bookstores were left with thousands of unsold hardbacks, which meant that when the second volume was published a lot of the bookstores didn't want to know. A friend of mine who's well-immersed in the book trade receives the UK's sales figures every week, and through those figures we were able to calculate that said publisher would have to sell the same amount of books more than three hundred times over just to recover their costs.
To break that down:
Let's say that the advance was £1,000,000 (it was actually quite a lot more than that, but let's keep things simple).
Let's say the hardback sells for £10 in the shops... Out of that, the author will receive a royalty of about 5% - 50p a copy.
£1,000,000 divided by 50p means that the publisher has to sell 2 million copies (of the three books in total, not of each book) to cover the advance.
However, since the publisher offered huge discounts to the distributors and bookstores, the author's royalty would be reduced. Let's say it's down to 3.5%. This means sales of 2,857,143 copies to break even.
But we haven't even added the costs of publicity yet... Advertising isn't cheap. We'll err on the side of thriftiness and give them a budget of £100,000... Now they have to sell 3,142,857 books, but a book that sells well but isn't a genuine best-seller might shift (in the UK) 30,000 copies over the course of its life.
One would be forgiven for wondering why on Earth the publisher shelled out so much to begin with: there's only about 60 million people in the UK and it would be madness to expect one person in every twenty to buy a copy. However, publishers can usually expect to recover a lot of their costs by licensing the book to other countries... But that'll only happen if the foreign publishers are interested, and they'll only be swayed by the number of copies sold, not the amount of money paid to the author.
Hmm... I know I had a point before I started all that!
Oh yeah, now I remember! People buy James Patterson and Dan Brown books because those are among the few books to which the people are exposed. They can't easily buy books that aren't on the shelves.
It's the same with comics, of course...
2000 AD used to sell a quarter of a million copies a week when it was prominently displayed in every newsagent. Now, well, you'd be hard-pressed to find a copy in a newsagent within a five-mile radius of my house (and I don't exactly live in the sticks). It's a matter of debate as to whether the comic doesn't sell because it's not being stocked, or it's not being stocked because it doesn't sell...
-- Mike
(We've kinda gone off-topic here. A bit.)
