I owe thanks to a thoughtful, sophisticated readership hungry for challenging subject matter, for honest portrayals of parenthood, and for fiction whose meaning is neither obvious nor morally pat. This peculiar, tortured novel was an unlikely bestseller, and has benefited from numerous individual readers with independent tastes who have hand sold it. I've met many of these readers, and they've confirmed my view that the publishing industry routinely underestimates book buyers, especially women, who don't all want to read girly pap.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
What publishers don't know
Lionel Shriver writes in today's Guardian about the experience of having a novel rejected by several literary agents and thirty different publishers, only to have it end up a bestseller and turned into a film - the history of We Need to Talk About Kevin. The success of the book, she says, has been down to word of mouth:
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8 comments:
Interesting, isn't it. I've heard quite a few people saying they bought the book because they heard it was so marvellous, but then couldn't read it. Especially writers - who couldn't cope with the inauthenticity of writing letters to someone who knew all about the events anyway because they'd lived through them....have I got that right? Hate to say it, but I haven't read it!
Well, I have to say, V, that I haven't read it wither, because I was put off by the voice which seemed to me affected and in authentic, but I should give it another go before passing judgement...
Vanessa, that's exactly it. If I may be allowed to link, I wrote a piece for PankMagazine last year
http://www.pankmagazine.com/pankblog/reviews/we-need-to-talk-about-beside-the-sea/
comparing We Need to Talk About Kevin with the superficially similar but infinitely superior Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi. The problem with Shriver's book is that it's contrived. It feels like a ploy, and to taht extent it's all the things we are told not to do - so I can completely see where the agents and publishers who rejected it were coming from. What they got wrong was underestimating the watercooler potential of the story - whcih is something writers (especially "craft"-oriented literary ones also underestimate in the reading public). Either way, Beside the Sea is a book people should read
Dan, thanks for that tip. I shall now have another go at WNTTAK (though it seems more than ever that my initial impression was correct) and shall seek out Olmi's book.
V interested in what you say re lit merit v water-cooler potential, and agents' and publishers' insights in this regard...
Thaqt distinction has been one of the interesting experiences from 3 years on Harper Collins' Authonomy. The breakthrough success for that site was the wonderful Miranda Dickinson, but in recent times, the books that have been signed up by HC have been (if you listen to writers on the site) "not so well written" (at least, in comparison to some of the admittedly exquisite books that are there), but they have been by and large true life or fictionalisations that stay close to life - and with a thumpingly interesting and provocatinve story behind them. In other words, HC are taking watercooler potential seriously, and I can see the point - getting people engaged is about the best form of marketing possible, and subject matter at its broadest level tends to be what gets people engaged and book groups interested (all of which I have to say leaves me shaking my head over why The Birth Machine, like the Olmi book, hasn't got the attention it deserves). This all ties in very neatly with this week's #litchat on twitter, which is about memoir writing
We (as writers) may strive for excellence in terms of authenticity/emotional reality ... but actually, what I'm hearing is that this may not be necessary. Another book that seems to prise writers as readers, from non-writers - is 'Room'...
Than you for that recommendation, Dan. I hadn't heard of that, and it sounds marvellous - off to investigate. And off to read the article. too.
Very interesting re HC and Authonomy. I guess it's what they call 'high concept', which publishers are pretty clear they're looking for nowadays since, as you say, that's what's marketable.
(Thank you, Dan, for your comment re TBM!)
Dan, Blogger seems to be going berserk. It wasn't alerting me to comments so I took the moderation off, and now it has alerted me to your latest comment but not published it! So I'm replicating it here below:
With apologies for wittering again, Elizabeth (it's only because your posts always get me thinking), Vanessa, re Room and maybe Kevin as well, I wonder if writers respond differently from readers the same way film critics love to have a go at Oscar films - where viewers and readers see interesting material, pundits see gimmick (and partly do so because it's easier copy to criticise than to gush).
This (whether the efforts at authenticity are worth it) would be a very good issue to bring up in the Guardian's ask the editor Q&A this Friday.
It's a similar question to that posed by the Frantzen-led debate over The Great American Novel and the column-inches devoted to novels with "sweep" as against those that use a zoom lens (and all the interiority-exteriority/public-private/time-space related debates that ensued). I publishers are very driven by viral marketing potential (of course - it's cheap) by which I mean water-cooler and book club more than anything to do with Facebook or YouTube, and the bottom-line is that it's very hard virally to market a book or film whose impact on you was deep, relective, and hard to explain - what is the "you've got to read this because..." line? Readers want to be part of that kind of buzz, and publishers want to give it to them, so high concept is everything.
And yet I think about my favourite mainstream-published authors, and their books are mainly very hard to quantify, lacking in sweep, absolute masterpieces of capturing the universal in the particular. And they're almost all "in translation". And in their home country many of them are huge bestsellers. Take my absolute idol and the World's Greatest Living Author by head and shoulders (well, for me anyway), Banana Yoshimoto. How on earth would one water-cooler-ise Kitchen? "It's about a mother and daughter. And they spend time together and time apart. Most of it in the kitchen" But it's one of the bestselling books in Japanese history. True, there is something very particular in Japanese culture that deals with the distillation of absolutes into the most specific instances, but there has to be something we can draw from her success.
Maybe it boils down to this - there are question books and there are answer books (with apologies to the "don't start a query with a question" agents, I would ask them to consider that all high concepts are rephrased questions even if the question is "what would it be like if?"). Because we are a gossip-driven society, and because we spread ideas through debate (blog comments, talk shows, red buttons, reality TV - they're all questioning, "what next?" "What would you do?" "How would you have handled it differently?"), and get to know each other through interrogation of each others' tastes, maybe that means we will always prefer question books.
Answer books, on the other hand, speak to our condition. They identify a need, or a dissatisfaction, or a yearning that's very personal, and built on introspection and openness about ourselves to ourselves, and then they address that. The satisfaction they give isn't an overflowing kind of "you've got to..." or "what do you make of..." satisfaction (the category reminds me of doctoral days studying Eros and the notion of sufficient as against super-abundant or perichoretic love - is everythnig down to a tradition based on a Trinitarian theology?), but the quiet satisfaction of a need met, or a storm stilled.
Vanessa, if you like the Olmi, do take a look at the other Peirene titles - the whole press is a certified national treasure.
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