How to Pick Your Readers

Readers pick stories but stories pick readers too

A New Era

In ‘How to Write to be Read’ we saw what a great leap it was when talesmen first told their tales to audiences they never saw, through the printed word and recordings of audio and motion pictures. Before this, the talesmen stood in the presence of their audience when they told their tales, and could thus judge the audience and pick a tale that might suit them; they could also judge the audience’s response to the tale as they heard it, and so turn it more to their liking. But once printing came into being, this direct link was broken. Now, through the intermediary of the media (whether print or audio- or photographic-recording) the talesmen commit their tale to record on the blind hope that the tale will do its work; the audience later come to the record and must make do with it as it is.

A tale such as this can thus never change to suit its reader. But it can at least choose the readers who will take it up, and this gives the talesman a chance to better the odds that his readers will like the tale.

Writing and Marketing: Non-fiction

With each choice the talesman makes as he tells the tale, he shades it to the taste of a part of the whole audience who might read it. He might choose non-fiction, for example. Then a choice of a particular subject can be seen to appeal more to one crowd than another. When he chooses a particular angle on that subject, he appeals more to one part of that crowd than the rest. With each new choice, he further defines those who will like the tale.

Much of the advertisement of these choices lies with marketing and how the tale is packaged, presented, and sold to its possible readers. But the act of telling the tale, in all the choices that the talesman makes, also fits the tale to be marketed in a certain way and to a certain crowd.

It is also true that in the years ahead, when self-publishing will gain more and more importance for all writers, the talesmen will themselves need to learn and consider how to market what they write.

Writing and Marketing: Fiction

There are two great camps of fiction, the general or mainstream, and the generic. Mainstream fiction tells tales that are meant to appeal to almost all readers. All the same there are some basic choices the talesmen have made that go into all fiction:

• To write at all excludes those who cannot read,
• To write in one language excludes those readers who cannot read that tongue.
• To write of any setting (time or place) will appeal more to those who like tales in that setting, and less to those who don’t.
• The relative length of the tale will appeal more to those who like tales of that length, and less to those who don’t.

Mainstream fiction

Mainstream fiction also has its divide today, between ‘popular’ mainstream fiction, and ‘literary’ fiction. Literary fiction is said to appeal to those of more refined literary taste, to the intellectual, or to those of more sophisticated aesthetic sensibility. Literary fiction may don the trappings of genre fiction, and may even appeal to those who like that genre, though in the past this has not usually been true. In general though we may say that the main appeal of literary fiction lies not in its tale or in its talesmanship, but rather in its literary quality, the craft and subtlety with which its paragraphs and sentences are shaped. The love of literary fiction is more a love of words and ‘fine writing’ than of yarn-spinning or of the ‘ripping yarn’ itself. As such, literary fiction lies outside my realm. Even so, literary fiction is a choice the talesman (I suppose we must speak of them solely as ‘writers’ in this case) makes when he considers the tale (and we can’t really call them ‘tales’ either) he will tell, and in every choice he makes in writing it, as well as how and to whom the work is to be sold.

Popular mainstream fiction can’t reach as far as it hopes, either. There are many readers who prefer their own taste in genre fiction to anything else. But in general mainstream fiction holds those books that are, and those that want to be, the big best-sellers of the day, crossing over to appeal to all readers. These are the books that make careers, sell movie rights, become famous and may even be taught in schools for years to come. In those lands and times where reading is a mainstream form of recreation, the authors of popular mainstream fiction are rich and famous as such, are fêted and celebrated and are celebrities who lead glamorous lives and marry other celebrities and famous princes, heiresses, and movie stars. In those lands and times where reading is of small importance, mainstream fiction will be but the largest pool in a string of small puddles in the cultural landscape, and it may well be true that the most popular genre talesmen are more famous, as well as richer, than most of their mainstream colleagues.

Genre fiction

Genre fiction will appeal only to a part of those who like to read for amusement. Some will enjoy more than one genre, but the nature of genre is such that almost none will like all the genres that are popular at any one time. There are genres that men prefer and others that women prefer; there are genres that children like and others that older readers like, and there are genres that appeal only to grown-ups. There are genres that many readers find offensive, vulgar, or disgusting. There are genres that appeal to small parts of the population on the basis of their ethnic or cultural background.

On the whole, any one genre (or sub-genre that lives as a small part of a larger genre) will go through a process of change that can be like that of a being that is born, grows and matures, and then ages and dies, maybe spawning some offspring along the way. A genre may also change shape like a river or coastline, enduring in the same name, but after a time it may look nothing like what it had been.

When a genre changes, it does so with and in response to its audience. The talesmen write for their genre and readers choose tales of that genre, for a reason; the likes and dislikes of this audience will bring some features to the fore and cast aside others. (Many of the talesmen of any genre will have started as readers and fans of that genre.) The genre will drive itself apart from the mainstream fiction of its day, by choice: the readers of the genre will choose that genre because it pleases them in ways that mainstream fiction does not, and the compromises that mainstream fiction talesmen must make when they seek to please men and women, young and old, and those of all backgrounds, will all be set aside in any genre.

Choices Not to Make

Some choices a talesman makes as to his tale can fight against his other choices. This will be a problem for those who write mainstream fiction (or non-fiction meant to appeal to all sides of a controversy) in the way that, say, a choice that appeals to women more than men, may be undone by a later choice that appeals to men more than women. The end may be a tale that pleases many only in a mild way, and pleases few in a deep way.

Genre fiction faces a different danger: choices may reflect the particular tastes of those who like the genre, and may not appeal to mainstream readers. The genre fans then make works popular that embody such specific choices, and the genre’s talesmen and editors then seek to frame future tales about those choices in more extreme ways. Fewer and fewer readers love such a genre more and more heatedly. But the fringe readers of the genre, its lesser or minor fans, may find these extreme tales not to their taste at all, and they may then stop reading in the genre altogether. Those who write and sell in the genre will then have no choice but to choose according to this extreme, devoted, but diminishing base of fans, until in the end the genre has nowhere else to go, and may die quite fast if those fans turn to something else, or get bored with the results.

Two examples of this danger can be seen in American comic books published since 1950, and erotic movies produced since 1973.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, March 8, 2008)