Hi Lesley,
Everything shouldn't appeal to everyone -- but the
idea that it should is a big huge enormous problem
in publishing today (_I_ think). Books that
_don't_ appeal to everyone are the ones being
weeded out in favor of books that sell a quarter
of a million copies in the first six weeks.
The same books don't even get enough time to find
their audience. It used to be that sf novels
stayed in print for a long time. That doesn't
happen much anymore.
The current audience for books is such a minuscule
part of the potential audience for books -- even a
huge bestseller sells to, what, 1/2 of 1% of the
population? -- that maybe it would be a useful
thing to try to enlarge the current audience. Not
try to jam science fiction down the throats of
people who realio trulio wouldn't like it, but try
to get people who might like it at least to try
it.
And they sure won't if we ourselves sub-ghettoize
the field and throw out everything that's "too
good" or "too popular."
Literary SF probably always will be a relatively
small audience -- isn't literary fiction, period,
a relatively small audience? -- but why not try to
draw in people who would be interested in it, the
same way you'd like to get the word out about your
library collections?
Vonda
(Who still has no idea how one would begin to do
this.)
On Sat, 8 Nov 1997 21:48:35 UT, Lesley Hall
<Lesley_Hall@CLASSIC.MSN.COM> wrote:
>>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
http://www.sff.net/people/Vonda
Some official good news at
http://www.bookwire.com/pw/bestbooks97.article$3946
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