The Market Trap
Or, commercialization is lying to you.
If there’s one common thread running through this newsletter, it’s my disdain of the idea of writing to market. (No, don’t leave yet.) We can get very granular about what this means exactly, but broadly speaking, there are a set of rules, or style choices, or otherwise narrowing of the manner of writing a story to conform to the whims of the present moment. Which I guess is fine if you’re concerned primarily with sales in the present moment.
On the other hand, have you ever seen an anecdote where someone polled the customer base, delivered on preferences, and then people still complained? That is, at least in part, a good summation of why I don’t like “the market.” Sure, people know what they like, but it’s not so simple to have them explain it in a useful way. (That’s why moderated focus groups are still a thing.) And if you’re optimizing around this fabricated market concept, you’re still not guaranteed to get the positive results you expected.
Perhaps the real distinction is this: Are you trying to sell a book or are you trying to tell a story? I’m trying to tell stories, and I believe there’s space in the market for them. Maybe it’s just a hunch, but there’s this thing you might notice where people like all different kinds of books. Even the ones that are outside the box the market wants you to fit in today (whatever day you happen to read this).
The Classics Paradox
A Story in Three Parts
The Modern Reader
There’s plenty of discourse around the topic of the modern reader. Men don’t read. Teens don’t read. Children don’t read. Nobody reads literature. Waning attention spans, gratification culture, the rise of smut. While most of these claims may be overblown, there are still underlying trends sparking the discourse. However, if we’re truly taking these things to heart, then it paints a bleak picture for the modern author, and you may wonder if there’s even a point to creating work that nobody will consume or appreciate.
But there are still plenty of books being purchased. Surely someone is reading them.
The Market
Major publishers are chasing sales. Maximizing sales means catering to the lowest common denominator. It means slapping cookie cutter titles on the trendiest stories. It means trying to be The Next Thing-that-blew-up, until there’s a new Thing-that-blew-up. Yes, it’s led by consumer tastes, but it’s also driving consumer tastes by controlling what is available. Eventually the wave subsides giving room for a new trend to take its place but it’s still largely curated from the top down.
In the independent publishing space, the prevailing notion is that maximizing sales means pushing volume. Churning out a dozen or more books every year, with perhaps formulaic, uninspired plots. It would be disingenuous to say that volume is always inversely proportional to talent. Some prolific writers are incredibly good at what they do. But it’s far from creating a healthy literary ecosystem, especially if we consider how many “writers” are just playing the numbers game with no real concern for the material itself.
It’s a climate of sameness and oversaturation. If there’s one thing true of people, it’s that we tend to seek out novelty. Why does nobody want to deliver on it?
The Classics
I’ve seen opinions expressed that to be successful, you have to write for a modern audience, which means writing books that are similar to what publishers want to publish. This could be a whole article by itself, but we’ll just distill this notion into an overgeneralized statement: Your book should read more like a Netflix series than a Homerian epic. Every part of me viscerally rejects this notion.
There are real human people out there buying the classics. They keep printing them for a reason. Every time a cinematic adaptation drops, sales spike. (That’s marketing.) One presumes that people are reading these books. I would be so bold as to say that people are enjoying these books. Naturally, one may regard a historical book through a different lens, but I can’t believe that a deep or winding narrative, perhaps rich in allegory or exposition, can only be “good for its time” and not good, full stop.
You will never be able to fully capture a bygone zeitgeist the way the contemporary books of a given period have, but decrying their respective styles rubs me the wrong way. You can’t sell me on the notion that some devices or styles are completely outmoded (especially for speculative fiction), or that taking inspiration from storytellers of the past can only lead to a career dead in the water.
What Is The Reality?
Let’s use for exemplary purposes a popular living author with a fairly lengthy career: Stephen King. He’s been selling books for some 50 years, and is still writing books that are well received. Now, someone can correct me if I’m wrong here as I don’t have a complete familiarity with his full corpus, nor read very analytically, but I’m willing to assert that the progression of his style over the years is more a reflection of personal growth than driven with a specific focus on who is buying books this year.
His back catalog is still in print all these years later and counting as well. So either people are forgiving his outdated prose or tastes haven’t changed since the ‘80s after all. No, wait. There’s that sneaky third possibility. Perhaps people like Stephen King because he writes like Stephen King. (More on this later.)
This could be the audience you write for if you weren’t a coward.
The Story Hypothesis
People read old books. People like old books. Let’s start with this assumption. There are two potential explanations for this.
People like classics in spite of themselves. It’s performative interest, driven by the associated history of the work or the hype surrounding the work.
People actually enjoy these stories, despite or because of the way they are told, despite their varied styles being contrary to the popular modern book.
I’m personally inclined to believe that a good story is a good story. Maybe somehow my attention span hasn’t been poisoned (like the rest of you degenerates), or maybe it’s the neurodivergent traits, but if I want to read a book, I’ll just start and finish it, barring external factors. If I’m captured by the premise, or maybe just because it’s one of those classics and I thought “what the heck,” I’ll give it a go. And I take it as it is, and I enjoy it some amount. But all the books I didn’t like were because the narrative disagreed with me—not because of the stylistic choices or the pacing or other more nebulous qualities. I don’t know what most people are like, but I’m sure there’s some amount of other people just out there, like, reading stuff.
Which isn’t to say that you could sell Moby Dick today. (Maybe most readers don’t want 100 pages of whale facts. (Or maybe they do?)) Which isn’t to say that by not trying to be the next Patterson, you’re going to be the next Hemingway. But it is to say that you shouldn’t be afraid to write for the audience you want, not the audience you imagine exists, or the audience the market is trying to curate.
I read another good article recently (which has escaped me for reference) that discussed indie author burnout and shifting away from the high volume production in favor of cultivating 1,000 “true fans.” The original (and updated) article by Kevin Kelley has the numbers for you, but the basic premise is that you don’t need to sell millions of units to make a living at your craft. (If the idea is just to make a living, and not be a stadium-packing blockbusting superstar.) If ~1,000 people are consistently giving you business, that is sufficient to live well.
Stephen King took off by being Stephen King. It was probably easier to break out in the ‘70s than it is today, but it’s also easier today to sell your work directly and to stay connected with your audience. You can cultivate your 1,000 true fans while writing in the manner that excites and inspires you. Maybe what you want to write is genre fiction that caters to a consumerist consumer, and that’s totally fine. But the idea that you have to write with the market in mind; that if you’re not busting blocks, you’re failing; these I won’t abide. I think it goes without saying, but this is your reminder that you’re allowed to write the story the way it calls you to write it. You can write like you and find people who like that. People who like you. However far removed from the market box your style may be.
If you build it, they will come. No content in this article series is legal advice.