The one where no one will read your book (and other truths about publishing)Elle GriffinMar 20 5124After I completed my first novel, I had dreams of a beautiful black book, its ivory pages sewn into the binding, the title embossed in gold leaf, a single red ribbon denoting the place where a reader might pause in their reading, adrift in another world.Perhaps, if I was lucky enough, more than a few readers would love it. Perhaps, in my wildest dreams, Reese Witherspoon would even recommend it to her book club. Perhaps it would go on to become a New York Times bestseller and Hello Sunshine would adapt it into a series for HBO. Perhaps I could spend my life as an author, writing books from the far corners of the world.Yes, perhaps. The unicorns of the publishing industry—Dan Brown, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Paulo Coelho—allow us to dream that maybe, just maybe, our books will make it too. If we just write well enough and persist long enough, by some miracle our books will make it onto Oprah’s nightstand and our dreams of being an author will be realized.Alas, that’s all it is. A dream.No one will read your book“One of the biggest ironies about this business is that there are lots of people who want to become authors, but that doesn’t necessarily equate with the number of people who are voracious readers,” says Rachel Deahl, news director at Publishers Weekly. “There is a disconnect. Not enough people read enough books.”Deahl, who has covered book deals for more than a decade, tells me the problem is a supply and demand one. “If you ask people how many books they read in the past year, they’ll say four. Or two,” she says. “There are lots and lots of people eager to become writers. But we need more readers. We need more people who are readers than we have writers.”Almost a third of Americans don’t read books at all. And, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the ones that do spend only 16 minutes per day reading. Compare that to the average Netflix watcher who spends close to three hours per day consuming video content. At that pace, a watcher might get through 681 movies in a year while a reader gets through only 16 books—and that’s presuming those 15 minutes are spent reading books.In reality, books compete for our reading time alongside newspapers, magazines, and other online publications. Even this year, when leisure time increased as a result of the pandemic, novels saw only a subtle increase in sales over last year—by 2.8 percent. News consumption, however, saw an increase of 215 percent with most of that time taking place on Facebook (23 minutes per day), Google (14 minutes per day), and MSN (five minutes per day).If the market for our attention is intensely crowded, the sliver of that market devoted to reading books is very, very small. And if the demand for books is small, the supply of books is great. To make it onto a reader’s nightstand, an author will have to compete with the roughly 3 million books currently in print to get there—and a seemingly endless supply of ebooks.And how a reader chooses those carefully selected few is a rather convoluted (and heavily commercialized) system. It has more to do with what Amazon recommends, what’s trending on The New York Times Best Seller list, and what a friend is obsessed with on Audible—and those algorithms are heavily dictated by what is already selling.“People tend to buy the books that are already really popular,” Deahl says. “They look at the bestseller list to see what they want to buy and that reinforces this tiny amount of books at the top. It’s a very top-heavy system. The tricky thing in publishing is success begets success. But it’s really hard to create that spark.”
