Larry and I went on the Blasters and Blades podcast to talk about fantasy, science fiction, and working together on Gun Runner. I also shared my weirdest experience on a book tour (hint: Reptoids from the Hollow Earth). It was a fun show.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/ujQj-crWe-8
An avid reader friend of mine began reading through the books in a list called “100 books you must read before you die.”
She got to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and went to Facebook and posted the following: “I don’t get the appeal. It’s about a group of boys/men who are irresponsible, drunks, whoring around taking advantage of others and being enabled by their women. Why is this a classic and why should I have wasted my time on it? Can some of my literary friends explain? I hated a brave new world and the handmaid’s tale too.”
Is the book a classic?
Should she read it before she dies?
Is it really that important?
Let me share an edited version of my response and then provide my list of 30 books you should read before you die.
*
Annette, the unfortunate truth is that these lists of “classics” are a sham because there is no objective criteria for determining literary excellence.
Or maybe I should say that measuring quality in the arts isn’t like measuring the unambiguous, objective score of a baseball game. After books exhibit a certain level of proficiency, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the quality of one book from another, especially because much of this depends on a reader’s interests and subjective experience of the story.
When it becomes hard to rank performances, people rely on other measures. One of the most powerful is social networks.
So if two readers find two different books that blow them away, one of the books might get all the attention because the one book gets picked up by a news service (The New York Times) or a platform (the Oprah Book Club effect) or some other social network of influence. A lot of the so-called literary classics only appear on various lists because they tapped into the academic network, which kept them alive far longer than they would have lasted otherwise.
On The Road is simply a book that made a stir among some circles in the 1950s. That’s it.
Was it more important or of higher quality than Exodus? The Chronicles of Narnia? Lord of the Rings? A Town Like Alice? All published in the 1950s as well.
It depends.
If you’re wanting to understand the 1950s beat culture, it would be an important book.
But if you’re wanting to understand fantasy writing of the time, it wouldn’t.
If you’re wanting to read a book that’s had a huge impact on popular culture, well, LOTR beats On The Road like a dog.
Some people have the feeling that the so-called classics have some inherent medicinal value because someone put them on a list and called them classics.
Nope. They’re just stories. Some of which can shed light on the issues and interests of a part of the culture in a given period. But if you’re not interested in that specific sub-culture, who cares?
And if you’re reading to be entertained, moved, uplifted, or educated—which ones do that best for Annette is for you to decide.
So all that to say I wouldn’t devalue your reaction to the book 
*
I’m now going to give you my list.
But it’s not going to be a list of titles. Nor will it focus on a book’s impact on some sub-culture of a given period.
It’s going to be a real list. One that focuses on what so many of us go to stories for.
We could do more than 30, couldn’t we?
Like the one that makes you think people from a different time period are just like us. And the one that makes you think people from that same period are completely alien.
But I think we’ll stop. That there above is a list.
Those are 30 books I think everyone will want to read before they die.
From publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin:
For a number of reasons, the belief here is that most of the time for most authors who can get a deal with an established and competent house, their best choice is to take it.
Sounds reasonable, but then we get to the money quotes.
The strength of the traditional publishers and the traditional deals is directly related to the amount of the market that is served by inventory in stores. When that proportion was “nearly all”, the power allocation was “nearly all” to the traditional publishers.
***
Self-publishing and new-style digital-first publishing can grow more to the extent that the book-in-store share of the market shrinks more. But while that’s happening, the big publishers are also adding to their capabilities: building their databases and understanding of individual consumers (something that all the big houses are doing and which the upstarts seem not to believe is happening, or at least not happening effectively), distributing and marketing with increasing effectiveness in offshore markets, and controlling more and more of the global delivery in all languages of the books in which they invest.
It will compound the pressure on the alternative players if Amazon continues to grow its global market share for ebooks. The bigger the percentage of the market that can be reached by self-publishers with one stop at Amazon, the less interest they’ll have in picking up smaller chunks of the market with additional deals and the more powerful will be any incentives Amazon cares to offer for making the title exclusive to them.
Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files, and thanks to Passive Guy for the original link.
Shatzkin’s discussion of the amount of the market served by inventory in stores is right on. But his “best choice” conclusion doesn’t follow.
Why?
Because the question for each author has to be which stores will I be in, what kind of floor space will I have, and how long will I be there? And in many cases the answers to those questions do not compete well with indie options.
For example, a lot of in-store sales come from the drug store, grocery store, airport, Walmart, Costco type venues. But it’s rare than an author getting an average deal will see the light of day in those places. Those are reserved for bigger sellers. And not very many of those. So unless you’re getting a big deal, you can’t count that floor space.
Poof. Tens of thousands of venues are now no longer part of the equation.
So you are now left with whatever number of stores the publisher can get you into at Barnes&Noble (a max of 675 stores), Books-a-Million (max of 200 stores), Hastings (max of 149 stores), non-chain stores, etc. I think the total number of book stores in the USA is around 10,000 or so. But publishers won’t get you into all of them. Some don’t carry your type of book: they’re used books stores, or kids book stores, or Christian book stores. And even if it’s a store like Barnes&Noble, you probably won’t get into all their stores. So how many stores will you actually be in?
Next, you have to wonder where you’ll appear in the stores you do get into. Will you be face-out somewhere prominent? Or will you have two copies spine-out in the back? If you’re spine-out, that’s just reduced the value of the floor space publishers offer you yet again.
Finally, how long will you be there? If you sell your two copies in a store, are you done at that store? Will your books be there longer than 12 weeks? Will they be there even 8 weeks?
James Patterson can sell millions of books because he has multiple copies in tens of thousands of stores with great display. And he’s usually there for more than just a handful of weeks. If you have two books spine-out in each of 500 stores for eight weeks, how well are you going to do?
Here’s some math on author revenue and units sold. Is selling 1,000 books with the royalties and contract terms offered really worth it? What about 4,000 books? 7,000? Are you going to be in enough stores with a decent placement to get those numbers?
If you’re going to be in thousands and thousands of stores with good placement, and the terms of the contract are reasonable, then, good golly, working with a publisher looks great. But if you’ve got a book that’s good enough to make an editor somewhere want to buy rights to it and the publisher is offering to put you spine-out in a little over a thousand stores with all sorts of contract crap, then Shatzkin’s “best choice” is really a poor one. In those situations my money is on going indie.
EDIT: It seems there are about 12,700 book stores in the USA. But that includes big-box stores, which I think are the Walmarts and Costcos.
James Dawson, YA author, feels it’s somehow wrong to hold back on cussing in his fiction. He wrote an article about this in the UK Guardian called “Why Teens in Books Can’t Swear.” He thinks it’s unrealistic. He thinks it’s about gate-keeper censorship. You know, parents wanting to steer their children towards certain experiences and away from others.
People.
Dawson’s approach to the whole problem is wrong-headed. This isn’t about the virtues and vices of fiction. Or about gatekeepers, especially in today’s ebook world. Or what experiences parents want to provide their children. And it’s not about art reflecting reality. Reality includes trips to the toilet, and yet we somehow fail to include realistic bum wiping in so many of our tales. Good heavens, have we betrayed our artistic integrity? No. We’ve just naturally chosen to include things that appeal to us and leave out others that don’t. Every book is an exercise in hundreds of such choices.
The fact is that Dawson’s forgetting that a fundamental aspect of the book trade is the trade. The buyer trades his or her money for a product (the book) that provides a service (the entertainment, thrills, chills, etc. of the reading experience) he or she values. A customer preferring one kind of experience over another isn’t censorship (the horror, the horror). It’s choice.
As an author, you make your offer. If folks like it, they buy it. If not, they don’t. Nobody owes you a purchase.
This means that in any business, and selling fiction is a business, the most sensible way forward is to offer your intended buyers something they are likely to value. Something they’re going to like. Something they want. If your buyer is thirsty and wants water, offer him a cold glass of water, not a waffle iron. And if you can’t bear to develop anything but waffle irons, then, by all means, develop waffle irons. Just make sure you offer them to the folks looking for . . . waffle irons.
This business of making offers also means that we package our products and services so that customers can easily tell what’s in the box. You don’t want someone to purchase your box thinking it contains breakfast cereal when in reality it’s a bunch of bolts.
Yeah, writing is an art. But offering it in trade to others is also a basic economic act.
Are things really bad as they seem on the news?
Are they getting worse?
Do we actually have an accurate picture of what’s going on in the world?
The answer is no. Not even close.
The normal American’s view is completely skewed. And negative. And that’s because the news is prone to be overly dramatic.
We think we’re learning what’s going on by watching the news, but we actually getting an incredibly skewed view. And that view is wrong.
In his book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Hans Rosling identifies a number of things we get wrong, but also the 10 reasons why, and how to avoid our tendencies to skew the data.
It’s a fascinating book.
For example, Rosling wanted to see how well we understand the scientific projections of how our population will grow. After all, a lot of people think we’re headed for an overpopulation nightmare.
In 1950 there were fewer than one billion children (aged 0-14) in the world. By 2000 there were almost two billion. How many do UN experts think there will be in 2100?
What do you think the right answer is?
If a bunch of chimpanzees had to answer the question above, each would choose an answer randomly. And 33% of them would get it right.
But when you ask humans the question, most of them get it wrong. Most of them, in fact, do worse than the chimpanzees. It’s not even close.
Rosling asked 12,000 people in 14 countries were asked this question, among others. Here’s how many got it right in various countries.
To be clear, no chimps were tested. That bar is in there just for comparison. But if they were, that’s how they’d do.
So how is it possible that humans do so spectacularly worse than the chimpanzees?
It’s not because chimps are secretly studying world population stats and hatching schemes. It’s because we humans think we know something, but, in reality, what we think we know is wrong.
And in this case, we think they know that the population is going to keep growing and growing and growing.
But it’s not.
The right answer above is C—there are 2 billion children now, and there will be 2 billion in 2100.
The world has hit the peak number of children it will ever have at any time.
There are around 6 billion people on the earth today. As those 2 billion children get older, the UN experts project the total population to fill out and grow to 11 billion in 2100 and then level off.
That means there is no overpopulation nightmare on the horizon.
Can this be true?
Read Rosling’s book.
Well, what about literacy levels? Poverty? Racism? Wars?
And what about the news—don’t we see the world going to pieces every night?
If you want an eye-opening experience, read Rosling’s book. He delivers all the insights with clarity, expertise, and humor.
Best of all, when you’re done, you’ll have a set of tools to help you correct the picture.
And while you’re waiting for the book, why not watch Rosling in action in this TED talk where he shows the data on population.
Last week a chart made the rounds, ranking the Presidents since Reagan on spending. Look at Reagan. That happy man is a freaking profligate. Obama, on the other hand, heck, he’s doing better than Bill Clinton.
Except there are a few problems.
First, I can’t tie this data out to the official CBO numbers.
Second, it does a bit of apples and oranges because the numbers are based on each president’s whole time in office. What does it mean when Obama increases the debt by 35% over three years, but it takes Bill Clinton almost EIGHT YEARS to increase the debt that much? A better measure would be an average per year.
Third, some have suggested this chart monkeys with the numbers, allocating the first year of each president’s first term to the previous president.
Fourth, the president isn’t the only one in Washington. Senators and Congressmen also have responsibility.
Finally, while a % increase in debt is a helpful measure, it’s not the only story. And it can be misleading if viewed on its own. For example, if we have $1 of debt, and I increase that to $10, I’ve increased our debt by 1000%. Holy Schnitzel! But if we have $500 million of debt and I increase it to $600 million, I’ve only increased it by 20%. Which is worse?
So I went out to the CBO and took their numbers from 1972 – 2011. You may get the XLS file yourself: http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42911. Then I made sure to identify who was in charge when and marked it with spiffy colors (Red is Republican, Blue is Democrat). Here are the results. Click on it to see it in its full size glory.
What does this tell us?
First, there was only ONE four-year stretch in the LAST FREAKING FORTY YEARS where the folks in Washington did not spend MORE than they took in. That was the four year period from 1998 – 2001.
What the?!?
Look at that chart again. There is a serious and systemic spending problem in Washington.
What happened in 1998 to change what had been going on for almost three decades? That was when the citizens got fed up with Washington, threw out a great number of the Senators and Congressmen, and bought into the Contract with America. This was when Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House. This was when Clinton was getting pounded for all sorts of stuff and worked with those particular Republicans in Congress to balance the budget.
Second, the deficit, the purple line at the bottom, tripled when Obama took office. And stayed! Who put that first chart together? Oh, yeah. It was Nancy Pelosi.
You might say, well, raw dollars is good. But what’s really important is how big a percentage that spending is of our nation’s GDP. If you’re spending 100 billion when the nation is producing 1 trillion, that sounds big, but it’s actually not as big a deal as when you’re spending 100 billion and the nation is only producing 200 billion. Okay, let’s look at these numbers as a % of GDP.
Again, 1998-2001 were good years. On a % basis, the folks in Washington during that time did better than anyone else in not spending the nation’s wealth. There’s no doubt that Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton during his fist 3 years and the Congress during those times were all happy to be big spenders. Look at the debt burden during their years. But Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress since 2007–drunken sailors compared to those guys. And then the Republicans come in and it doesn’t change. Gridlock?
Let’s look at our presidents since 1972 and see how well they do on an annual basis. Those numbers in the first list, BTW, are stated in billions.
Seems to me the most fiscally responsible groups were those in charge during the latter part of the Clinton years, the Nixon years, and the year when Nixon resigned. It appears that during that year the folks in Washinton were so busy with the Watergate scandal they forgot to feed their spending appetites.
Bottom line: as I said before, Washington has a serious and systemic problem with over spending.
And when I say “systemic” I mean it appears the whole thing is rigged to produce over spending. We don’t just need new people out there. We need a system that prevents the overspending. We need an ammendment that requires a balanced budget and caps the size of the government in relation to GDP.
We also need to find a way to incentivize Congress to pass a budget each year. No budget, no pay is a good idea. The current House has indeed passed a budget. But the Democratic Senate has not, preventing us from having a budget at all. Obama submits budgets, but not a soul in the Senate, Democrat or Republican, will vote for them. It’s only the Republican House who seems to want to actually do their job. How can that be? Read It’s Deja Vu All Over Again with National Fiscal Policy for more info.
This November we need to get a bunch of folks like those in 1998 back in Washington. A President AND a Congress who will actually finally tame the nation’s out of control spending. Let me suggest you look at your Congressman’s and Senators’ records. How have they voted? As for President Obama, well, I’m looking at the numbers above.
I’m a bit irked.
I wish I could talk to a publisher about this. I should talk to a Barnes & Noble corporate book buyer. But since I don’t have one handy, I’ll discuss it with you folks. Maybe I’m up in the night? You tell me.
Here’s the deal. My wife is 7th and 8th grade language arts teacher. My wife is also a mom who loves books and wants her girls to read until their eyes bong out of their heads.
So we go to find books for her students and for our girls and, jeez, wouldn’t you know it, but this YA book features masturbation and that one features lots of fine words like F*** and S*** and this one is about giving the guys a blow job (tee, hee, hee).
Yeah, I know about YA saves. This isn’t about banning this or that content.
It’s about the fact that I’m a parent. And, geez, I have a certain way I want to raise my kids. My wife is a teacher who needs to provide books to her students that aren’t going to piss some parent off. Why? Because she’s providing a service to that parent. Because she wants to keep her job. And because it’s her job to help parents improve their kid’s reading ability not tell them how to raise a family.
So why in the Sam Hill can’t publishers rate their books?
There are millions of their customers who would find this useful.
Well, here’s one answer I was given by a writer friend I respect.
Everyone in the industry is really pushing back against the idea of a rating system. Let me see if I can explain why.
A friend of mine, ZZ [name removed], is the nicest person in the world. Volunteered for years at a prison to help people learn to express themselves by writing. Her older brother was a closeted homosexual for years, contracted AIDS, died too young. She wrote a book recently called [title removed], about a family in the restaurant business (as hers was) who have a “late” baby and the problems it causes for the older teens, one of whom is coming out as gay. It’s a soft, quite, sad, moving book. And it would be part of the “rating” system and banned from a bunch of schools. ZZ also wrote a book a few years ago about teenage pregnancy. Also beautifully written, kind, compassionate. But it would get tagged by schools as “inappropriate.” ZZ feels strongly that there are kids out there who need books, kids in your wife’s school system who need to be told they are not alone.
I don’t see any way to have a system that distinguishes between books that I see as anchors to kids who need help and those books which I see as genuinely offensive and encouraging bad teen behavior by glorifying it. The only system I know is me recommending the best books I see. And I’d much rather see librarians and school teachers go through books on a case by case basis, deciding whether they personally think it fits the values in their community than to have someone else not attached to the community do the same thing.
Uh huh.
If this is accurate, it shows the industry’s stunning lack of creativity AND arrogance. Because if publishers really were listening to parents, they could come up with a solution.
No, really. They could.
Why, there’s already one out there. They don’t even have to expend even one creative molecule to find it.
Look at the Kids-in-Mind rating system: http://www.kidsinmind.com/. It rates movies 1-10 on sex, violence, and profanity (SVP).
There’s no age stipulation in their ratings.
Unlike other rating systems, there’s no “children under 13 not admitted.” No “appropriate for teens.” No recommended range for this or that group or this book is good and that one’s bad.
It just rates the content and gives it a number. You, as the user, determine what level you’re comfortable with and then find the movies that fit.
I’m a 4-10-4 on sex, violence, and profanity. You might be a 5-2-9. That’s not good or bad. It’s just what it is. More importantly, the rating allows me as a consumer to EASILY FIND AND PURCHASE THE PRODUCT I WANT.
I know some folks have never heard of it, but consumer choice is a really cool thing.
And if I hear about a movie that’s amazingly good, but I see it doesn’t match my normal levels, then I can make an informed choice to watch or not watch. The King’s Speech, for example, is a bit above my normal profanity setting. But this didn’t prevent me from watching the film (it was a fabulous movie, btw). SVP just gave me a couple of pieces of simple data I find useful as I make my choices. Data I’m already looking for.
If publishers were to use a similar rating system, every librarian could peg the levels they wanted in their school and be done with it. As well as consider special cases. Teachers could peg the level for their classroom. Parents could search and find and buy. And they could guide their kids in their purchases as well.
Make it easy for them to go case-by-case. And don’t imagine librarians and teachers and parents are going to read every YA book published to find those that fit with their values. They don’t, can’t, do that now. They won’t in some utopian future. If you give them SVP ratings, it will help them spend their time, case-by-case, on books that they’re likely to buy. Which probably means they’ll buy more.
Write about homosexuality, rape, whatever. But make it easy on the consumer to see if it’s the kind of product they want to buy.
Some might say, but themes of homosexuality and rape and child abuse etc. etc. are important and would be automatically excluded!
No, they won’t.
You can write a story about those themes that scores low on SVP. You can write about those themes and score high. Themes are outside the SVP scale.
Some parents, librarians, and teachers may want to avoid some themes. Others would seek them out.
So, good golly, here’s an idea only a rocket scientist could come up with. OR someone who took the issue a tiny bit seriously and wanted to serve their customer. How about a little box under the SVP rating that contained “sensitive” themes.
They don’t have to do what Scholastic does with its school catalogs and label them “mature” themes, which might suggest “mature audiences only.” They’re not “mature” themes. They’re not “bad” themes. They’re not “good” themes. They’re just sensitive themes.
SVP and Sensitive Themes: four little pieces of data consumers would find oh so incredibly helpful.
But no. The industry can’t be bothered with that. And, consequently, reveals its arrogance and total lack of respect for a HUGE portion of their customers.
I guess they think librarians are mindless idiots. Never in a million years, if a librarian is tuned into the needs of her community and thinks a book on homosexuality would be important, would she search on that sensitive theme and her SVP ratings. And parents would never do that for sure (do you know how many gun-clinging troglodyte parents there are out there!?)
I guess the industry thinks because it sits in an office in NY City that it knows everything about raising kids. It knows so much it must dictate to parents how to do it right.
Yeah.
Or maybe what this really shows is that the publishers have got a book they want to sell. They want to make a buck. And, dang it, this might hurt sales. Because then people wouldn’t buy things they didn’t want.
They really don’t seem to care about what many of their customers want. Because if they did, and they realio trulio cared about these sensitive topics and saving the world, then they’d publish books high on the SVP because they’re just sooooo goooood, but they’d also publish books on those topics that are equally as goooood with SVP ratings that the majority of parents and school districts would be comfortable with.
And they’d let the customer choose what they wanted to purchase.
Customer choice. Customer service.
Wow, what revolutionary concepts.
They even might find that if you delight the customer, they’ll come back for more.
I know, I know. I’m living in fantasy land; delighted customers coming back for more . . . as if.
Question is: will the publishers listen?
We’ll see. I truly hope I’m wrong about their arrogance and disregard towards huge swaths of their customer base. In the meantime, you might want to think about talking to the manager of your favorite book store about this. Strangely enough, books stores have a lot of pull with publishers.
You also might want to look at Kids-in-Mind. It seems to make a lot in advertising. Looks like there’s money to be made in a review site like that for YA books. I know a lot of people who have said they wished they could just read books for a living. Anyone feeling entrepreneurial? Anyone?
EDIT
Two more points.
First, what’s sensitive for one person may not be for another. But that’s the beauty of this. This only identifies subjects that would be sensitive for reasonable sections of the market. For someone with your reading tastes, you’d say, eh, homosexuality, big deal. That’s not a sensitive subject. For others, they’d say, hum, have to think about it.
It’s just giving data. A respect and recognition of different tastes. Not a prescription of what someone’s taste should be. Or what people should or shouldn’t feel is sensitive subject matter.
For this reason, I don’t think publishers would want to use the word “controversial” because that implies controversy. Just sensitive (or some other similar label). Or even “Potentially Sensitive Themes.” This is just giving data about content areas SOME parents might want to know about.
Second, the SVP is not going to be 100% perfect. But something is much better than nothing. And having some clear standard for rating, whatever it is, pegs things so you can figure out where you are. As long as the raters are fairly consistent, then you can tell if something is close to the type of product you’re interested in. There will be goofs. No doubt about it. Huge goofs would be probably very infrequent because a ten-point scale allows you to make gradual distinctions. But I’ll take some goofs now and again over nothing at all.
Furthermore, because it’s NOT age-based like the MPAA and prescriptive in the target audience, it’s not telling parents what to do. There is no “good for your kids” and “bad for your kids” rating. Just the level you’re comfortable with.
Finally, some people object to ratings because “how can you boil a book down to a few numbers?” I don’t think this boils a book down. It’s only a couple of pieces of data about a book. Data parents are already looking for. The cover, recommendations, word-of-mouth, flap, description, buzz–these are all pieces of data as well.
In fact, you and I exclude many books based on genre labels alone. And yet we don’t worry about a genre labels much. They’re useful pieces of information. Are they always perfect? No. But they’re by-and-large very useful. I don’t see that this is much different. Just another piece of data to help consumers find what they want.
