By Edward Nawotka
Our lead article today looks at statistics from BookSwim.com which identify high-income suburban women — the proverbial soccer moms — and library users as key demographics of readers. This falls roughly in line with the results from earlier National Endowment for the Arts earlier studies that cited the same two groups as the most avid readers of all.
But the question must be raised, do publishers by following sales patterns inadvertently dictate the the demographics of readers? Since there are so many romance and mystery readers, has the business — like an athlete whose sports inevitably causes them to favor and thus overdevelop certain muscle groups — become disproportionally predisposed to publishing primarily for those readers?
Would the readership among suburban dads or Latino teenagers be higher if there were more and better titles for them? For example, I’ve personally held that the NYC-centric publishing industry does a great job of publishing fiction for itself — those rafts of novels about Manhattanites looking for love and aging Brooklyn hipsters who can’t get their lives together — but doesn’t cater as well to the 290 million people in the country. (And, it could be argued, the industry doesn’t do all that much to pander to the bridge, train, tunnel and highway crowds commuting into the city from Westchester, Connecticut and New Jersey — territory the New Yorker was focused on for so many years).
Is it a chicken or the egg situation?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
7 Comments
Interesting. Publishers have said for years that romance novels sell better in the southeast, south and midwest. Therefore, more romance novels are distributed and shelved in these areas. Demographics or availability? Who knows?
Exactly, it’s a catch-22 situation. It’s going to take indie presses and a cottage industry to break the mold, even if they are distributed by the big whale major publishers.
It seems to me that the job of the small press is to reach out to under-served markets. A big publisher may see a market of 10MM easy to reach readers in the NYC area, but cannot justify the costs of trying to hit a market of 200k readers. Small press can. In my mind its also about the philosophy of a publisher. Are they a business who happens to produce literature works of art or do they have a social responsibility to create art of all forms for all people?
All that being said, you have a great point that publishers would probably do well to take some risks to try to convert non/occasional readers by targeting their needs more.
It seems to me that it is less the publishers and more the critics who are to blame. More often than not it is the “blockbuster” titles which get all the attention from the critics and the subsequent sales in turn dictate what the publisher publishes. After all publishing is a business and the bottom line is always paramount
Hm. Interesting. I wonder if we can get closer to answering this question once digital books start taking up more of the marketplace.
I think Caroline might be on to something.
I recently suggested to the book editor of the Dallas Morning News that the paper might want to take a look at the raft of books being published about the Dallas Cowboys in this, their 50th anniversary year. I count 25 books (including children’s titles) scheduled for release about the Cowboys this year and of those, five will be coffee-table sized, fifty-year histories of the team.
With the Cowboys being so popular in Dallas and Texas, I thought the paper would jump at the chance to address this sub-market. Not a chance — the critics at the DMN would much rather focus on the sort of books that sell well to the Manhattan crowd.
Reading their response I got the sense that reviewing mere football books was beneath them, customer demand be damned . . .
RE: Critics — Fred and Caroline. There is indeed a problem with critics feeling obligated to weigh in on the “big” books of a season. They want their voice to be heard as one of authority on those titles that are making national headlines — and yes, it is often to the detriment of other titles. Why is it that so many critics have the same or similar “top 10″ lists for the year when there are nearly a million titles published?
As regards the Dallas Morning News, which I review for frequently (I live in Houston) — I can say with authority that it dedicates more to local book coverage than many of the other papers I’ve worked with. The editor of the book pages is open to almost any pitch for the books section with regard to a book with a Texas angle — of any genre (I’m covering a graphic novel for him this fall) — and I would also suspect that you’ll be seeing coverage of the books on the Cowboys appear on the Sports pages than the Life/Books pages. You should too — the Sports pages are usually the most widely read part of the paper.