Marketing vs. the Romanticism of Reading Fiction

There’s authors out there who blog about the market and share all the juicy little details with their readership. They’ll say things like, “According to recent analytics, this is the best genre to be writing in right now,” or, “These keywords get the most reader engagement on Amazon,” or, “If you want sales in this genre, your book must fall between 70-80k words.”

This is valuable information for writers … sort of. These are all moving targets, and it’s difficult to write something from scratch in response to a market trend in order to catch what’s left of a zeitgeist wave.

But, and I speak as a reader who greatly enjoys fiction when I say this, readers don’t care.

They love escapism. They want to be swept away to another world.

Cracking the code in this ever-changing market is great, but it doesn’t mean a writer should pull back the curtain and reveal the turning gears. Readers don’t necessarily need or even want to know that they’re reading your books because they got swept up into the machinations of some algorithm. They don’t want to think, “I picked up and enjoyed this book precisely because the focus-grouped cover art caught my eye, it’s 70k words long, I am a female between the ages of 26 and 34, vampires are hot right now, and the plot within perfectly fits a classic story archetype.”

One of the worst cases I’ve seen had the writer saying something like this:

“I’m writing in this genre because it’s got the most sales potential. A writer’s job is to sell their writing, that’s all.”

This kind of emotional detachment from one’s work shatters any kind of illusion that they’re in it for the art. There are plenty of by-the-numbers writers who are in it for the sales, and that’s fine. But I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some of the readers pick up on this emotional detachment and stop caring about the books as a result. Not everyone out there is a trend-following sheep. And the ones who aren’t tend to be the ones who stick around for life.

Bottom line: A readership doesn’t want to feel like they were manipulated and guided toward your books like livestock.

Now maybe it’s just me and most readers aren’t bothered by this, but when I read a book, I want to believe that the writer wrote it with passion, and that the number of pages are just as many as there should be to service the plot. No more, no less. A fiction reader wants to feel like their favorite author doesn’t release new books just because it happens to be “the appropriate release bracket for maximized sales”. They want to believe something magical stirred inside the writer which inspired them to write and publish their work. I admit that’s a romantic way of looking at the industry, but it helps keep my favorite books closer to my heart.

I’m not saying writers shouldn’t calculate these kinds of things to help maximize success. After all, there’s enough challenges stacked against us as it is. But sharing market knowledge with the readership–especially when it pertains to what kind of story you’ll be writing next–maybe isn’t the best idea. Once drawn back, it’s impossible to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.