Amazon.com shares Bookscan numbers with authors, so I can compare sales for the week ending 2/13 (the day Charlie wrote the introductory blog post) and the week ending 2/20, which is the last one they have data for. I can also tell you that the numbers for that last week show a jump of...
::cue dramatic music::
Forty books even--22 for Child of Fire, 18 for Game of Cages.
Not that Bookscan covers every sale. Venues it doesn't report: ebook sales, sales outside the U.S.A., stores that refuse to share numbers with Bookscan, and probably a bunch of others I don't know about. Estimates are that Bookscan reports anywhere from 50%-80% of actual sales and it's impossible to judge where my books fall in that range.
To muddy things further, some other things have popped up that would have driven sales, so it's possible that not all those forty sales might have come from here.
Anyway, the point I'm making is: that's the best number I have, but it's not that accurate and it's not terribly important to me. What is important is that I've enjoyed guest-blogging here. Thanks for having me.
I had planned a very different post for this spot but instead I'm putting it on hold and, knowing me, probably means I'll never get back to it. It was an expansion of my previous post about assuming people want to live inside the books they read, and it was supposed to cover everything from the discredited canard that romance readers are starved for love to the idea that Joe Abercrombie or George R.R. Martin's readers are nihilistic cynics with a taste for depravity--or that reading a book about a "chosen one" reveals a yearning for authoritarianism(!)
But I don't want to write about that. It's too contentious, too disjointed and, frankly, too close to the subject of my previous post. (If only I'd thought to label that other post "part 1".)
Instead I'm going to offer a short post with a video embedded. Here's the preamble: We've all noticed there has been an explosion in subgenres. It's not just science fiction, fantasy, and horror anymore. It's paranormal romance, new weird, mundane sf, urban fantasy, MilSF, space opera, fantasy of manners, psychological horror, and so on and on. Not all these labels are new (several are very much not new) but there are more than I ever remember. Our books are being marketed to us differently.
Why? I'm not a publishing insider, but I think I know where it came from. In the 1970's and early 1980's, food researcher Howard Moskowitz completely changed the way food was sold to the American people, and those changes spread out into the world and into other industries.
Here. Watch this short video. It's a TED Talk in which Malcolm Gladwell tells Moskowitz's story, it's under 18 minutes, and it may change the way you think about books, food, and happiness.
This is why we have so many kinds of mustard and tomato sauce on our supermarket shelves, and I'm convinced this is also why book marketers (who after all are in the business of getting a book you will like in front of you) have continually been creating new subgenre categories.
Now, the industries are not completely the same. You can't create a novel in a laboratory kitchen, where you can vary the ingredients to find the ratio people like. Books are works of art. However, if the incentive is there to find a more precise label, they'll do it.
Another difference between books and food is that some of the new subgenre labels have come from the audience itself. They name for some new thing--too often by putting "-punk" at the end of a word--and that becomes the new flavor, the new genre.
Another important point from the video is that consumers do not always know what they want. This isn't exactly a revelation to readers, who are always discovering unexpected pleasures inside book jackets: Did I know I wanted to read a mash up of James Bond, Office Space, and HP Lovecraft? Hell no. But I did, very much so. I mention it because it's something that should be said often. Readers don't always know what they want. We should be trying new things constantly, just in case we come across our new favorite flavor, and good writers create the niche they will occupy.
Finally, I close out with this quote from Gladwell when he was talking about upscale and downscale condiments.
"Mustard does not exist in a heirarchy." Meaning, we all have variable tastes, and none is objectively superior to the others.
What do you think? Is it a revelation? Complete BS?
