Scarlett, Your Novel is Burning
This column is a new Monday feature of One More Bite of the Apple, part of a reorganization following the Earl’s house arrest. He needs time to prepare his defense in the Thoringian dressmaker murder. Look for the Earl to appear on alternate days as he pursues his literary career in this very crowded marketplace. The Dutchess is working on an advice column that may run on Thursdays, time permitting. She owns over four hundred clocks and the Dutchess and her staff are working over time since Saturday midnight to ‘fall back.’ She reports that over two hundred time pieces remain on ’summer time’ where the living is easy.
This is a stripped down blog. One thing the Earl and I agree on, the passion we share, is the writer’s dilemma, the struggle to do a decent job of telling a story. Book length fiction is not an easy form to master, not an easy thing to stick with. One of the unfortunate by-products of marketing books is the focus on genre, a focus that is relatively new, a product of the past few decades. What was intended as a means of differentiation has run amok. The worm with its head cut off grows a new one ( don’t try this at home.) A forty headed worm has risen from the ashes of a once coherent business; book publishers are creating imprints so demographically refined that a 46 year old mother of three in search of something to read, perhaps a new experience, may find herself wandering the frozen tundra of Barnes & Noble in search of a 46 year old mother of three novel that marketing specialists are convinced must appeal to her, because, it is her, it is her life, she’s 46, she has three children, her husband lies in state before the big screen TV, her neighbor owns an Airedale, My God, this is uncanny. In the next aisle a 47 year old mother of two may find her book, a slight demographic twist, she’s a liberal democrat in a neocon suburb, her husband a fading rock star, the neighbors are blogging from a converted attic above the garage, someone is leaving odd messages on her voicemail and her thirty year high school reunion looms large.
Okay, well, ultimately this is where the marketing department is taking us. Imagine that you are a young lady, to the manor born, accustomed to all the finer things. Your home is a mansion and you are preparing to enter society in your first cotillion. War breaks out. Invaders arrive. They burn your fields, then your house. Not sure where to turn, you explain your problem to the clerk at Barnes & Noble. He nods. He understands. There is a novel for you, but it’s out of print. We have a large print version available in our Decatur store. You plead with him to hurry; he punches his keyboard, his fingers are flying. You swoon, he catches you and whispers ‘Aisle Six.’
October 31st, 2005 at 10:08 am
There you go. With properly targeted marketing, it might be that readers would only need one novel, ever–one that would be so satisfying that their thirst for reading would be forever quenched. (I’ve seen a couple of them that almost put me off reading permanently, but not because of an excess of satisfaction).
Speaking of the thirst for reading, did you see that Time has published thier list of 100 greatest novels in English since 1923 (the year they atarted publication)?
http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html
I find I have read only 44 of these. (45 if you include one I put down and never picked up again.) Most interesting is their inclusion of “Watchmen”, which is a comic book. (Excuse me: A Graphic Novel).
Maybe I should stop reading everything else until I’ve read these, huh?
DI