>I wouldn't even know how to start attempting to enlarge the market.
This is a question which has quite a bit of resonance for me at the moment as
there's a move afoot at work (a specialist library) to try and get more
readers through the doors, more quantifiable statistics of use, etc. The
approach being undertaken seems to me a bit scattershot, as though getting
people through the door is an end in itself, rather than making sure that the
users who really need to know about our collections, but don't, are able to
hear about us (and I'm sure there are large nos of these).
And I often wonder, does anything have to appeal to everybody, or even the
majority, or at least a large percentage? Why shouldn't things be a minority
interest? There are innumerable minority interests which nonetheless have a
wide enough basis of support (given that a single-figure percentage of the
contemporary literate, book-buying population is still A LOT of people) that
they are economically viable in publishing terms (not just fiction but hobby
interests, etc).
I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that far more people had bought the 2
anthologies in which my 2 published short stories appear, than either of my
academic works, although (because of the economics of academic publication)
both of the latter are thought to have done quite well, since more people buy
Penguin anthologies (I imagine) than buy hardbacks from Yale UP.
I realise that this may not be the way publishing conglomerates think: though
I do have a vague sense of reading somewhere that the thing these days IS
'niche-marketing' rather than selling everything like boxes of washing powder.
Lesley
Lesley_Hall@classic.msn.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:07:06 PDT