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The average American reads 17 books per year

ByJohn Brown

Americans and Reading

The Pew Research Center has just published their findings on reading in America. It’s called “The Rise of E-reading“. There’s a LOT of fascinating information in the report. Here’s a taste:

  1. Americans 18 and older read on average 17 books each year. 19% say they don’t read any books at all. Only 5% say they read more than 50.
  2. Fewer Americans are reading books now than in 1978.
  3. 64% of respondents said they find the books they read from recommendations from family members, friends, or co-workers.
  4. The average reader of e-books read 24 books (the mean number) in the past 12 months; the average non-e-book consumer read an average of 15.

Building an Audience

I also want to recommend this week’s post by Kris Rusch on Audience. She has a number of interesting things to say about the dream of being a best seller and building an audience. The money quote comes as she refers to a post by Tracy Hickman:

“The point here is that you do not have to feel as though you are in competition with the entire world. You don’t NEED the entire world to be a successful writer. What you need is an audience—just enough of an audience, mind you—who reads your words, is changed by them and wants to come back for more.”

An audience. More importantly, an audience that reads and “is changed by” your words. Not an audience who loves them, not even an audience who likes them. An audience who is changed by them, and because of that experience, “wants to come back for more.”

Simple. Important. Usually forgotten.

She talks about lots more. Read the whole thing.

My thoughts?

First, there’s no need for authors or readers to worry about wading through “crap.”

According to Pew, readers only read 15 or 24 books a year on average.  That’s not a lot of books.

More importantly, it takes about 3 seconds to get a lead for a good book.  You hear something from a friend or family member, you look at the USA Today best sellers list, you browse a few books at a store or online, you read a blog and suddenly you’ve found a book. 

Readers fill up their book reading slots much more quickly than they can ever empty them.  That’s why we all have years of reading in our queues.

It doesn’t matter that there are millions of other books out there, a good majority of which might have been written by monkeys. There’s no need for authors to worry that readers will have to wade through a mountain of crap to find a good book. They don’t need to because they have leads for good books coming out their ears.

Second, people purchase books that friends, family, and co-workers love.

Which means that when you deliver a great experience to one person, it’s going to ripple out. It’s probably not going to be linear. It’s probably going to ripple out like viruses do into different population pockets. Or seeds do into different environments. It will run through one pocket, make a jump to one or more others, or it may not jump at all. Some pockets are big, some are small.

The way to keep a virus going is to release it in a lot of places where it’s likely to thrive or in places that a lot of people travel through. And as Kris points out, writing is all about repeat business–making sure you have a stream of good product (something I hope to rectify with my own writing this year).

Bottom line: the best way to build your writing business is to simply write the best book you can, and keep them coming.

Third, the market is BIG. 

If you read Rusch’s and Hickman’s articles, you’ll see that even the mega sellers only reach a fraction of those who read. This is reinforced by the statement made by Thomas McCormack, former CEO of St. Martin’s that you can read here. So just because 100,000 people read one book doesn’t mean 100,000 others won’t read mine.  

Moreover, e-books and online shopping are broadening distribution. Brick and mortar stores only have so many slots for books. Every 8-12 weeks they rotate the old books out (like 12 weeks is old) and replace them with the new ones, unless, of course, your book is selling very well and gets “modeled” at the store.  The point is: when you only display a few books at a time, those books will get bigger sales numbers. This happens because there isn’t anything else to purchase.

But you don’t have that limitation with e-books and online shopping. Nothing rotates out of the store. Sure, things rotate on and off the best seller lists. But the books are always there. With an ever growing selection, there won’t be as many mega sellers.  Publishers Weekly discusses this trend in their 2011 Facts & Figures articles, which list best-seller numbers (make sure you click through to the Trade Paperback article as well). The same thing has happened with TV station viewership with the explosion of channels, DVDs, and online streaming. Same thing happened with music.

What this means is each author has a better chance of getting his or her books to those who will love them. We’ll still have best-sellers. But we’ll also have a lot more medium sellers as well. And that’s great for authors everywhere.

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    You’re invited to join the novel writing workshop pilot

    ByJohn Brown

    I am developing an online novel writing course and am looking for folks to pilot it with me and give me feedback. I’m thinking I want to limit it to 10-12 folks.

    It’s free and will probably take two or three months to complete. If you join, your job will be to do the work. And there will be work. I’m thinking 10-15 hours of work per week. Please don’t ask to join if you don’t want to make this commitment. I only want folks who are serious and ready to give this a shot. In addition to the work, you’ll need to report your experience with the course as we go, sharing with me where you get stuck, what’s confusing, what’s helpful, what does and doesn’t advance your skill. In fact, if at some point the course just isn’t providing you any value, you are welcome to drop. That’s good feedback too.

    It’s going to be a blended format that includes self-paced work and some type of weekly online meeting. I will be guiding the class. At the very least, we’ll meet and chat at my site. I don’t know if we’ll do a live meeting or not. Still working that out.

    I struggled for many years, trying to figure this stuff out, then had a number of epiphanies during Orson Card’s boot camp and continued from there. Of course I still have lots to learn. But I want to share what I have.

    I love teaching and have been teaching in one form or another for the last 20 years. I’m currently an education program manager at a large software firm. What this is all means is that I’m trying to build a course that guides folks through a process that will help them learn to WRITE novels. Not just talk about them.

    So this is not a series of lectures with quizzes that test your ability to recall, although I will quiz you.

    It’s not a course with an end goal of teaching you what I’ve learned about the concepts and principles of plot, character, and setting, although you will need to learn that.

    This is about increasing your ability to get ideas, develop them, and then write.

    It’s about doing the work. It’s about production. It’s about finishing product. And having a good time doing it.

    If you already feel comfortable with your ability to finish novels, this is NOT the course for you.

    You can learn more about the course here by clicking The Path in the On Writing menu.

    Probably the only other thing you need to know is that the class is a PG-13’ish class. While the stories can deal with intense and adult themes, as the teacher, I’m not interested in working with stories with explicit or detailed sex or lots of language of the sort that would earn a movie rating more restrictive than PG-13.

    Remember, this is a pilot. Even though I’ve taught about writing for a number of years to various audiences, there might be some rough spots. We might find we need to change the work requirements or activities or any number of things.

    If you’re interested, click on the Contact link on the menu of my site, and shoot me an email.

    Edit 1/30/15: I’m getting a number of excellent questions about the time commitment and schedule. Let me answer them here.

    The gap I’m trying to fill

    First, you have to understand that I am not interested in talking about novels and writing novels. I’m interested in helping folks finish novels. That’s a big gap I see in most writing instruction. It’s the gap I had. There was nobody to help me move from the theory to the writing, and writing all the way to the end. So this isn’t a class about novels. It’s a class where I hope to help you learn a number of techniques for developing and finishing one. And to learn those techniques, you have to actually use them. Which means you have to develop and finish a novel 🙂

    So why 10 hours as a minimum?

    If you’re a slower writer, it’s going to take you around 50 hours to develop and write a novel of 25,000 words. That’s the size of one of Louis L’Amour’s smaller novels (which we call sometimes call “novellas” today). It’s the size of some smaller romances. A lot of indies are writing serials around this size. If you want to write a 50k book, it’s probably 100 hours, maybe more. A 75k novel? 150-200 hours. The development and first draft of a 100k novel? 200-300 hours.

    These are not exact times. Some writers are faster. But you get the picture. Writing a novel is a big project. And I’ve found that it’s just too hard to get any traction on less than 10 hours per week. When you spend much less time than that, you spend most of your time just trying to remember what the story is about. I’ve found it’s best to keep your writing engine hot, or at least warm.

    So will these 10 hours be in meetings?

    No. I don’t want to have a lot of meetings. That’s the beauty of online. We will have deadlines. But you should be able to complete you work during the times that suit you best.

    What’s the course schedule?

    I can’t give you an exact schedule. I haven’t timed everything. Figuring that out is part of what we’re doing in this course. But I do know what I want you to learn and how I hope to help you learn it. We’ll just have to see how far we get with each weekly 10-hour chunk.

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  • SODG out to first round of possible blurbers

    ByJohn Brown

    “Blurbers” is so much more fun than “endorsers.” Stacy has sent the manuscript of Servant of a Dark God out to the first round of people who said they would give the story a go. If they find they’re in the audience, they’ll write up a blurb for it. This is all in preparation for the launch meeting in December when my editors go to bat for me and sell the book to the salespeople inside Tor.

    While I hope the potential blurbers will all find themselves in the story’s audience, I do not assume it’s a given. If they’re not, I’m still a happy man (although a bit disappointed). There are many wildly successful tales that I myself am not in the audience for.

    I expect we’ll get reactions back in a month or two. I’ll post here the results.

    I can’t remember the last time I was this anxious. Yesterday I read Scott Card’s review of K.J. Parker’s stuff.  All his business about great writers. And I’m thinking, holy heck. I’m a nothing. Just a little dude with this nothing book. And then I thought, what if none of these readers find they’re in the audience for the book? It’s one thing to send out a manuscript. You can always change, improve. But this is it. This is the book. It either soars or plops in the mud.

    But then I read Mette Ivie Harrison’s first article on writing for IGMS and thought—you know what, I tell the stories I tell. While others may aspire to “greatness,” that’s not something I care to strive for. I want to write stories that entertain and move. And while I can learn how to write and tell better stories, they’re always going to be John Brown stories. If they plop, they plop. And I just have to forget all the greatness-everybody-must-love-me nonsense and write John Brown

    I met Mette at Card’s boot camp in 2002. We’ve read each other’s manuscripts every once in a while. I respect her ideas, loved MIra, Mirror, and am grateful for that article. If you’re a writer, I recommend it to you highly.

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  • The Harry Potter Book of Mormon Hello

    ByJohn Brown

    For those who haven’t been tracking the Broadway scene, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone launched the production of The Book of Mormon musical last year in New York. It won 9 Tony Awards, including best muscial, delighted many critics, and is something I will never see, alas. It’s simply too vulgar for this Mo. However, the show’s cast album did something that hasn’t happened in over 40 years: It hit the top ten on Billboard’s pop charts. While I couldn’t listen to all the songs (yeah, I tried but was almost struck by lightning), “Hello,” the first, is great. But it doesn’t stop there. Oh, no. Tessa Netting, a 20-year-old Broadway actress, recently had the brilliant idea to combine the characters of Harry Potter with the song. I think you’ll be delighted with both.

    “Hello” from the musical

    “Hello – Harry Potter Book of Mormon Parody” which you can get on iTunes.

    You might want to listen to an interesting All Things Considered NRP interview where Stone and Parker talk about the music.

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  • Is 90% of everything really crap?

    ByJohn Brown

    Whenever you talk in speculative fiction circles about quality writing you will inevitably hear someone cite Sturgeon’s Law.

    Theodore Sturgeon, a science fiction writer, defended science fiction against critics of the genre who said that 90% of science fiction was crap by saying that 90% of everything–film, literature, consumer goods, etc.–was crap. Therefore, pointing out that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms do. So neener neener neener.

    The problem with this “law” is that it isn’t a law. It’s not something discovered through rigorous testing and careful evaluation of data. In fact, no testing was performed. It’s an opinion, but “Sturgeon’s Opinion” lacks the authoritative power needed to silence the critics. 

    Unfortunately, while citing the law may be a good way to give the literati what for, it’s a terrible way to think about books. I say this because we often mistake “poor quality” with “it wasn’t to my taste.” By doing so we mislabel diamonds as dirt.

    How can this be? The answer is in the true nature of quality.

    The business world has spent many years and much treasure trying to understand what quality is. I think writers and readers can benefit from the paths they’ve blazed. I found a great summary of quality on Wikipedia.

    Business has tried to define quality in a producer-consumer context, with the following variations:

    1. ISO 9000: “Degree to which a set of inherent characteristic fulfills requirements.”[2] The standard defines requirement as need or expectation.
    2. Six Sigma: “Number of defects per million opportunities.”[3] The metric is tied in with a methodology and a management system.
    3. Philip B. Crosby: “Conformance to requirements.”[4][5] The difficulty with this is that the requirements may not fully represent customer expectations; Crosby treats this as a separate problem.
    4. Joseph M. Juran: “Fitness for use.”[5] Fitness is defined by the customer.
    5. Noriaki Kano and others, presenting a two-dimensional model of quality: “must-be quality” and “attractive quality.”[6] The former is near to the “fitness for use” and the latter is what the customer would love, but has not yet thought about. Supporters characterize this model more succinctly as: “Products and services that meet or exceed customers’ expectations.”
    6. Robert Pirsig: “The result of care.”[7]
    7. Genichi Taguchi, with two definitions:
      a. “Uniformity around a target value.”[8] The idea is to lower the standard deviation in outcomes, and to keep the range of outcomes to a certain number of standard deviations, with rare exceptions.
      b. “The loss a product imposes on society after it is shipped.”[9] This definition of quality is based on a more comprehensive view of the production system.
    8. American Society for Quality: “a subjective term for which each person has his or her own definition. In technical usage, quality can have two meanings:
      a. the characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs;
      b. a product or service free of deficiencies.”[5]
    9. Peter Drucker: “Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for.”[10]

    The common element of the business definitions is that the quality of a product or service refers to the perception of the degree to which the product or service meets the customer’s expectations. Quality has no specific meaning unless related to a specific function and/or object. Quality is a perceptual, conditional and somewhat subjective attribute.

    What does this mean for writers and readers?

    It means that your audience defines quality. But your audience is never all of those that read. It’s only the narrow segment that reads for the type of experience you’re offering.

    It means that a story can be of the highest quality, but you still may not like it. You might even hate it.

    It means that Sturgeon’s Law is, no disrespect intended, crap.

    All writers should consider NY Times best-seller Tess Gerritsen’s experience writing for two different audiences.

    I’ve had too many smart and well-read friends like stories I do not. I’ve loved too many stories that others could not. I’ve seen too many stories I couldn’t read more than two pages of picked up by editors and find audiences. And the tales of editors passing up on stories that some other editor picked up and which became mega-sellers are legion. 

    Quality has never been an absolute. The truth is that while I enjoy many stories in a variety of genres, a lot of what’s published is not to my taste, but it’s still very good.  

    A more accurate statement of Sturgeon’s Law would be something like “90% of what’s out there isn’t to my taste.”

    For readers this means we need to be careful to distingush between something that doesn’t work for the audience it’s intended for and something that simply doesn’t work for us. For writers this means we need to write the best story we can and then avoid pressing it onto the wrong audience. And when we do get a bad review, we need to figure out if it’s the quality of the story or just a matter of taste.

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  • Edward Bear Shares More Proofreading Secrets

    ByJohn Brown

    Mr. Edward Bear (pseudonym) shared an awesome secret for sussing out quote issues in a previous post. He’s back with a nifty way to help spot spelling issues.  It helped me spot a number of inconsistencies in Bad Penny, which I recently fixed. Take it away, Mr. Bear.

    * * * *

    Augmented Proofreading 2

    Last time, I mentioned checking spelling and spelling consistency, and this note is to fulfill my promise.

    To begin with, I’ll admit freely I do not recommend just running a spieling chucker over the text. And yes, I’m using the phrase deliberately. The spelling checker in the program I’m using to write this just waltzed right past it, despite the fact that neither word makes sense in this context. I got started trying to get some mileage out of spelling checkers a while back, when I realized that OCR scanners will work like hell trying to find a word and probably will come up with a word, but it will be the wrong word. Over at Project Gutenberg, they use the term “scanos” as an analogue of “typos.”

    The other adversary is consistency of spelling and usage. Examples might include “canceled” and “cancelled” or variant possessives, such as “Jones’” and “Jones’s” in the same text, or simply variant spellings of the same character’s name, such as “Erik” and “Eric.”

    So what do I do for these sorts of problems?

    What you need is a list of all the unique words in the story, and it’s easy with a dollop of regex. (See the first post on this topic. The one I’ve taken to using is the following:

    [^-‘‘’\w\d\r\n]

    This one I can explain, since I wrote it. 🙂

    What it says is to look for any individual characters within the brackets([]). The leading caret (^) says “Nope, they should not be in this list.” Following that are the hyphen(-), the straight  quote(‘), and the opening and closing curly single quotes(‘’). After that, it’s any character that would normally be in a word (\w), any digit (\d), any carriage return(\r) or any new line aka paragraph terminator (\n).

    And what you do with the above is to set Textpad (see previous post again) to replace all of them with a newline (\n) character.

    Here’s what the search and replace box in Textpad looks like for this:

    Augmented Proofreading image001

     

    Notice that the “Regular expression” box is checked. And then you choose “Replace All”.

    The result is to turn this:

    Once upon a night we’ll wake to the carnival of life
    The beauty of this ride ahead such an incredible high
    It’s hard to light a candle, easy to curse the dark instead
    This moment the dawn of humanity
    The last ride of the day

    into this:

    Once
    upon
    a
    night
    we’ll
    wake
    to
    the
    carnival
    of
    life
    The
    beauty
    of
    this
    ride
    ahead
    such
    an
    incredible
    high
    It’s
    hard
    to
    light
    a
    candle

    easy
    to
    curse
    the
    dark
    instead
    This
    moment
    the
    dawn
    of
    humanity
    The
    last
    ride
    of
    the
    day

     

    For a book, this means what you have as a multi-thousand line long document and LOTS of repeated words. The next step is to lose the repetitions by sorting the list. For TextPad,  you’ll find Tools->Sort on the menu bar, and I generally set the sort up as the following:

    Augmented Proofreading image002

    This is a case-sensitive sort and “Delete duplicate lines”, of course, gets rid of all the duplications of words like “a”, “an”, and “the”.

    For the above text, you get:

    It’s
    Once
    The
    This
    a
    ahead
    an
    beauty
    candle
    carnival
    curse
    dark
    dawn
    day
    easy
    hard
    high
    humanity
    incredible
    instead
    last
    life
    light
    moment
    night
    of
    ride
    such
    the
    this
    to
    upon
    wake
    we’ll

    34 unique words.

    And here’s the payoff for all this funky text munging: Run a spelling checker over this, and it will find typos, of course, but it will also generally complain about most names, which aren’t generally kept in spelling checker dictionaries, and it will also show you words and their variants, nestled fairly closely together. Here’s an example from one of my projects:

    Swiss-born
    Take
    Talking
    Tallmadge
    Tallmadge’s
    Tarelton
    Tarleton
    Tarleton’s
    Tavern
    Tecumseh
    Tell
    Ten
    Thames

    The spelling checker landed on Tallmadge and its possessive form, but do you notice the “Tarelton” on the list? That’s the time for the Aha!, and you can fix the “Tarelton” form. The same thing applies to possessive variants and any other variant form you find.

    As with the last post, I’ll be peeking in on the comments and answering any questions that come up.

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  • Good Stuff! 4 Delightful Movies

    ByJohn Brown

    If you’ve been looking for some good movies to watch, I have four here that I think you’ll enjoy.

    Wives And Daughters CoverThe first is for fans of Downtown Abbey and Pride and Prejudice. It’s a four-episode, BBC TV miniseries called Wives and Daughters, and is based on the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, who was a popular English novelist in the mid-1800s. Gaskell is the one who also brought us the delightful Cranford and North and South, which all my daughters love.

    Wives and Daughters is about Molly Gibson, the daughter of a country doctor, who suddenly has to deal with a new stepmother and a stepsister who becomes Molly’s good friend but brings a lot of baggage with her, mostly concerning men. It’s also about a man whom Molly falls in love with, but who only thinks of her as a sister.

    But it’s about even more than that. It’s about the enjoyable relationship Molly has with her father and the local Squire and his family, and the issues the Squire has with his own sons. It’s also about how the women in the town and the local gentry deal with Molly.

    Gaskell has a knack for showing both the good and bad about people and still making you love them. She also writes a fabulous ending. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the ending, for me, was just brilliant in so many ways. If you enjoy period romances, you’re going to love this.

    *

    The-Hundred-Foot-JourneyThe next movie is called The Hundred Foot Journey and is a humorous story about a contemporary Indian family down on its luck. The father leads them to England, but things don’t work out. So he takes them on a trip through France looking for the place to set up their restaurant. Except it’s a bit of a hare-brained idea because France doesn’t do Indian food.

    The family’s vehicle breaks down outside a little town, and the father decides this is the place where they will try to build their life again. The problem is the spot he’s chosen is right across the street, the titular hundred feet, from a posh French restaurant. And the battle between the two restaurant owners begins.

    You’ll laugh and fall in love with the characters in this story. And when it’s over, you’ll immediately want to go out and get some Indian food. It’s a great film.

    *

    The_Good_Lie_posterAnother wonderful fish-out-of-water story is The Good Lie, which is about three of The Lost Boys of Sudan, refugees who are resettled in America.

    In 1983-2005 there was a civil war in Sudan, which lies on the southern border of Egypt. During the war, government troops and rebels of the south systematically attacked villages in southern Sudan, killing 2.5 million and displacing a million others. The Lost Boys and The Lost Girls were children who escaped the attacks and traveled by foot in search of safe refuge. For many that was over 1,000 miles across three countries to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. Over half died along their epic journey, due to starvation, dehydration, sickness and disease and attack by wild animals and enemy soldiers.

    In 2001, as part of a program established by the United States Government and the United Nations, approximately 3,800 Lost Boys were given the chance to leave the camps and resettle in the United States. This film is inspired by their experience. In fact, a few of the actors are actually some of those who were resettled.

    The beginning of the film is about their journey. The rest is about what happens when they come to America. There are many poignant moments in this film, but there is also a good dose of humor and goodness. It’s a wonderful film to watch with the family.

    *

    McFarland,_USA_posterMy last, but certainly not least, recommendation is McFarland, USA, made by Disney and starring Kevin Costner. My family and I simply loved this movie. We loved it so much some of us ended up watching it three times because we couldn’t coordinate our schedules and so watched it again with the family members who weren’t there the first time.

    It’s based, with a little literary license, on a true story about Jim White, a teacher who re-starts a cross country running program in 1980 in McFarland, a small agricultural town at the south end of California’s Central Valley. It’s another fish-out-of-water film with this White coach being introduced to Hispanic culture.

    Now I know what you’re thinking—oh, jeez, another sports film. And, yes, it has many of the same story beats that you find in many sports stories. But this one seemed to make them all fresh again. All I can say is that we loved it. In fact, immediately after the third viewing, two of my daughters were so juiced about running, they went out on a run of their own.

    If you like sports at all, you’ll like this one. But even if you don’t love sports, you’ll like it because it’s not really about sports. It’s about the human spirit and seeing value in the things everyone else overlooks.

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