by Eric Flint
But averages like this don't really mean that much, because in the real world most book buying is done by a relatively small percentage of the population. Estimates on this vary, but it's never more than 20% of the adult population and usually closer to 15%. If you exclude those adults who don't read any books at all, for instance, which is about 25% of the population, median book sales in the US as of the study (which was done by Associated Press-Ipsos) rise to seven books a year.
But even that's not very meaningful, because while it may be true that three-fourths of the adult population buy all the books, the majority of those books were bought by a much smaller percentage. The livelihood of authors and publishers really depends on that (approximately) 15% of the adult population who are more-or-less constant readers. People who read at least one book a month, often one book a week, and some of whom read even more than that.
Before I go any further, I need to dispel one myth, so it doesn't get in the way. That's the widely spread and often-spouted myth that readership is declining in America because of the impact of modern electronic entertainment. To quote from the AO-Ipsos study, "Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media."
Well, the analysts are wrong, and the reasons they're wrong—as is so often true with social analyses of all kinds—is that they lack any historical perspective. The truth is that the American population has never—not once, not in three hundred years—been a population that, on average, reads very much. And when it does read, the preferred reading for most Americans has always been either religious texts—mostly the Bible—or self-help non-fiction literature.
That was true in 1900, long before the internet came along. It was true in 1800, before there any workable electricity. It was true in 1700, before anyone even knew what electricity was.
In short, it's "caused" by the way American culture developed historically, that's all. Different nations have different reading habits, shaped by their own history. Russians, for instance, have always read a lot more than Americans.
I won't spend any more time on this, because it's a digression from my central point here. Which is simply this:
One. There is obviously a tremendous expansion possible in the amount of book buying that Americans do. (And other nations, of course—but I'm focusing on Americans because they still provide the great majority of the readership for English-language genre fiction, including science fiction and fantasy.)
Two. Of all the many factors that determine how much any given American reads, the factor of "competition" between authors is so negligible that even to include it at all as a causative factor is silly.
Which leads me to my second point. The actual relationship between authors is not and never has been competitive in the first place. Or, to put it perhaps a bit more precisely, whatever competitive aspects do exist are simply dwarfed by the many ways in which the work of authors is complementary and mutual reinforcing.
The real effect upon other authors whenever one of them becomes extremely visible to the public and wildly popular is not and never has been to crush the rest. Rather, that author's popularity tends to do the exact opposite. It creates what you might call a new sub-category of the fiction market—or, more often, popularizes one that already existed—and makes it far more popular. As a result of which, most authors who work in that same sub-category start seeing an increase in their sales.
We've had, very recently, as graphic a demonstration of this truth as you could ask for. What was the effect of J.K. Rowling's phenomenally popular Harry Potter series on the sales of other writers who produced works of fantasy for a juvenile and young adult audience? Did she drive them under? Obliterate their careers like a one-woman Mongol horde?
What a laugh. In fact, the sales for many of those authors got a tremendous boost as a result of Rowling's popularity.
Nor is this an isolated instance. To the contrary. It's the common pattern, and has been throughout history. To give another example, the impact of Anne Rice's very popular vampire novels was to turn writing about vampires into something of a not-so-small industry. To give yet another example, the popularity of Tom Clancy's techno-thrillers almost (not quite) single-handedly created the entire techno-thriller sub-genre.
I could go on and on. J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings transformed fantasy writing from a relatively small sub-genre of science fiction into a sub-genre of its own that today outsells science fiction by a large margin. The impact of that trilogy was further enhanced when the reissues of Robert E. Howard's old Conan stories start coming out—but they only came out because Tolkien had demonstrated there was a huge market for fantasy.
Look anywhere you want, and you'll see the same phenomenon at work. The pioneering mystery stories written by Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle did not crush the mystery genre. They created it in the first place—and their work was rapidly expanded by such great mystery authors of the so-called "Golden Age of Mysteries" as G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Patricia Wentworth, Georges Simenon, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and many authors.
Were these mystery authors competing with each other? No, they were complementing each other. Their combined visibility is what elevated the mystery genre to a major writing market in the first place.
The same phenomenon, in fact, is the basis of my own success as an author. As of now, I've written or co-authored something like twenty-five novels. (No, I don't remember the exact number and I'm not going to take the time to figure it out. There are two benchmarks that tell you you're a successful commercial author. The first is when you realize you can't remember offhand exactly how many books you've published. The second is when you realize that at least half your income is coming from royalties instead of advances.)
I write in many sub-genres of science fiction and fantasy. But it's the one-third of my books which are alternate history that generate most of my income. That's primarily the 1632 series, but not exclusively.
The pre-eminent alternate history author today, as he has been for a decade and a half, is Harry Turtledove. He's not the only one, of course. Other prominent alternate history authors include myself, Steve Stirling, and the collaborative team of Newt Gingrich and Bill Fortschen. Not to mention that Philip Roth, generally considered a literary author rather than a genre author, recently published an alternate history novel (The Plot Against America) whose sales dwarfed those of any of the established authors in the sub-genre.
I do not now and have never considered Harry Turtledove—or Steve Stirling, or Gingrich and Forstchen, or for that matter Philip Roth—as my "competitor." I'm not that blitheringly stupid. In the real world, it would be far more accurate to say that my own success is due to Harry Turtledove than that it has been in any way "thwarted" or "stifled" by him. It was Harry, more than anyone else, who both demonstrated to publishers that there was a sizeable market for alternate history—and, to a large degree, even created the market in the first place. I had the good fortune to come along at a point when alternate history was growing rapidly as a popular genre, and since my own expertise is in history I naturally leaned toward that kind of fiction anyway.
Having given that well-deserved tip of the hat to Harry, my horror of false modesty forces me to add that I have certainly not been parasitizing him. My own popularity as an alternate history author—along with that of Steve Stirling, Newt Gingrich and Bill Forstchen, and a number of others—has turned the sub-genre from the one-man show it almost was in the mid-90s to the very large and popular sub-genre it is today. One of the effects of that change has been to solidify Harry's career, certainly not to undermine it.
Any author with half a brain knows this is true. So why do so many of them seem to lose their mind when this same, simple truth is applied to the internet and electronic publication? Why in the world would anyone think that the greater visibility enjoyed by authors who use online promotion aggressively would hurt any other author?
> Visibility is visibility, regardless of how you achieve it. Whether it's through very good sales of paper editions, extensive advertising, media hype—or aggressive use of free and cheap electronic distribution—the net effect will be the same. By drawing more readers to Author A, the sales of other authors whose work is similar will get promoted as well. Not as much, granted—but nothing prevents them from following the same policy.
The expression "a rising tide lifts all boats" has been much misused. In many areas of economic activity, it is not true at all. But it does happen to be true when it comes to publishing, at least entertainment publishing. (Different factors affect things like the sales of textbooks or religious works.)
Finally, there's a third flaw in the argument. One of the characteristics of the commercial entertainment publishing industry, precisely because the market is so opaque to potential customers, is that there's an enormous amount of waste. "Waste," in the sense that a very high percentage of the time and money that readers devote to reading turns out to be wasted for them.
Why? Because they buy a book and then discover they don't like it. In the case of non-fiction, which is often purchased for practical reasons, that can be compounded by discovering the book didn't provide them with what they thought or hoped it would.
I am personally convinced that it is this aspect of book-buying—a phenomenon which is well-known to me and every other person in the history of the world who has ever bought more than a handful of books—that is the single biggest obstacle to book purchasing.
Call it the pig-in-a-poke factor.
The obstacle is certainly not price. The fact is that except for a very small number of high-priced books, which are usually either technical texts or limited-print-run collector's editions, the cost of the average book—yes, even hardcovers—is a piddly expense for the average person who is well-educated enough to read regularly. Students are really the only big exception. In the nature of things, students are starving students, as they damn well should be.
(Hey, look, I was a starving student too, once upon a time. I can well remember a steady diet of the cheapest meat available, potatoes and cabbage, living in a rundown apartment and driving a jalopy. Did me a world of good. Yet... somehow I always scraped up the money for books.)
(Okay, and booze and cigarettes and other starving student items some of which will remain nameless. This is the age at which human beings first learn the great philosophical truth that—economists be damned; buncha gloomy types, natural born devotees of Schopenhauer and Cassandra—luxuries are more essential than necessities.)
Granted, if someone buys a lot of books, that can become a significant part of their budget. But each book, by itself, doesn't amount to much.
An average hardcover volume these days costs about $25. That's the approximate cost of going to the movies for two people, if you add in the popcorn and soda that most of them will buy. And for that same money, they get about two hours of entertainment sitting in a movie theater. Except for a small number of speed readers, an average novel will provide a lot more hours of entertainment than that.
A paperback costs eight dollars. That's a meal for two—less, usually—at a fast food joint.
No, it's not price. The real problem is that people have been burned way too many times from buying a book and then discovering it wasn't what they wanted. Either because they discovered they didn't like the author's manner of story-telling or writer's style, or because they discovered the subject matter was not what they really wanted.
The effect of the pig-in-a-poke factor is to reinforce—drastically, in fact—the natural conservatism of readers faced by a very opaque market. As a rule, most readers most of the time stick to the very small number of authors they are familiar with. (In the case of fiction. In the case of non-fiction, they will usually be more far-ranging in their buying simply because they have to be.)
And that's the third area in which electronic publishing—more precisely, having an expansive attitude toward fair use when it comes to electronic publishing—can play a major role in easing the skepticism of an author's potential audience.
I will use myself as an example. No potential reader of mine who has access to the internet needs to buy anything of mine on a wing and a prayer. It is easy and free of cost (money cost, if not time) to investigate my work before you plunk down one dollar for any of my books.
Here's how you do it:
Go to www.baen.com.
Select "Free Library" from the menu at the top, on the left hand side.
Once you're in the Baen Free Library, select "The Authors." (Fourth item down, in the column on the left.)
Then select "Eric Flint"—or any one of the other authors who have works in the Library. There are over forty of them, and the number keeps growing.
My most popular work are the volumes in my 1632 series. If you're not sure you'd find that series to your taste, it's easy and free to find out. You will find the first two novels in the series in the Library—that's 1632 and 1633—along with two of the anthologies devoted to the series. (Ring of Fire and Grantville Gazette, Volume 1.)
Think you might like my alternate history series dealing with early 19th century America? You can find the first book in that series also in the Library. That's 1812: The Rivers of War.
If you might find a series that combines alternate history with fantasy to your taste, you should take at look at the first book in the Heirs of Alexandra series that I'm writing with Mercedes Lackey and Dave Freer. That's The Shadow of the Lion, which is also in the Library.
I could continue, but I think the point is made. While you're at it, you can read—free of cost, and unencrypted—the first book or books in popular series by David Weber, David Drake, John Ringo, and several others.
In short, by using free distribution online of our work, many of us have essentially eliminated the pig-in-a-poke factor.
To go back to the question at hand, what would be the effect on book-buying if all authors started doing the same thing?
Well, obviously, one of the effects would be that every author would lose some sales. Not every reader who examines an author's work for free is going to like it.
Fine. Those are not sales any intelligent author wants anyway. Word of mouth works both ways. I don't want someone who dislikes my work to pay money for it. Whatever short-term gain I make is more than offset by the long-term damage of having negative word of mouth running loose out there. Which it will, don't think it won't—if the reader paid money for it. But what I've found is that readers who investigate my work for free and then discover they don't like it, don't have any hard feelings about the matter. In fact, I know of several instances where they recommended me to someone else, whom they thought might like my work even if they didn't.
To repeat myself, this is not rocket science. It's simply the authorial version of that common-sense business practice known as "goodwill"—which has been well understood by lowly shopkeepers and shoemakers if not oh-so-cerebral auteurs since the days of the Sumerians.
To conclude, the notion that if all authors followed my policy when it comes to an expansive attitude toward fair use—or a variant thereof, since there are many possible—the end result would be a decline in the income of authors as a class, is wrong.
And it's wrong on all three counts.
First, the market for writers is not fixed. It's a pie whose size is wildly variable.
Second, writers are not competitors anyway. The real impact of a popular author on the book market is to enhance the sales of other authors, not diminish them.
Third, by eliminating at least some of the opacity of the book market, expansive fair use diminishes the tremendous waste that takes place now—and thereby makes readers more willing to experiment with new authors.
* * *
To some extent, I've been beating a dead horse in these last two essays. Or, it might be better to say, viciously lashing a pitiful crippled beast who is not quite dead yet but is founder
ing fast.
The truth is that, at least within the world of science fiction and fantasy, this part of the argument has been mostly won by now. It took a few years, and it was primarily done not by argument but by the practical examples of authors like me and Baen Books as a publishing house. But by now, it's pretty much a settled argument. There really aren't too many authors or editors out there any longer who doubt that expansive fair use practices with regard to electronic publishing enhances the sales of paper editions.
(As opposed to the bean-counters who run most big corporate publishing houses, who still can't see their nose in front of their face.)
But that's now where the stumbling block has come to be. It's slid back, so to speak, to a different level of opposition.
The argument that is now advanced can be summarized as follows:
Yes, it seems clear that distributing electronic books cheaply or even for free does enhance sales of the paper editions of those same books. And, since the book market today is still overwhelmingly a paper market, that works to the short-term advantage of authors and publishers.