Give Readers What They Want

The New York Times' guest columnist Tim Egan provides weekend readers with a little proselytizing: people who routinely massacre the spoken word shouldn't write books.

I've got a few problems with opining that Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin shouldn't write a book because they speak poorly. First, speaking and writing are different. Maybe they can write. They certainly are not writing books because they think themselves capable of writing good books. They don't think they can write. Don't be ridiculous. They think they can get a big advance. (They won't write a page of those books anyway.)

Who is Egan to take someone to task for writing a book? Writing should be encouraged, at least morally. Writers are more valuable than readers. Writers read more, read better, and create better reading material than readers do.

What Egan is actually saying is that Joe's and Sarah's stories aren't worth reading. As his column is a guest op-ed, he's entitled to his soapbox.

Also too Egan should instead criticize publishers who agree to bring a Joe the Plumber book to market. Unless, of course, the publisher is correct in believing that people actually want to read that book. And these are my main points: the publishing industry should only judge a book by its sales and should focus on giving readers what they want. The publishing industry pumps out between 170K-205K books each year and most of those are never reprinted because readers don't want to read that many books...

...and because many of those books are not interesting to readers. The industry thinks about the product instead of the customer. Rather than producing what the customer wants, the industry produces the best possible version of the idea that book represents. In other words, the industry is focused on the romantic idea of "the book" rather than on the wants and needs of the customer. In a way, performance arts are similar. Orchestras and operas desire to achieve the highest quality of their art, yet very few people truly enjoy classical music.

And in fiction, no one can predict what will sell. Unless they are fortunate enough to have proven authors, fiction publishers are almost literally guessing at new books. The book's quality is not necessarily relevant (e.g. the Twilight series). To compensate, fiction publishers must toss a lot of product at the market to see what sells. Once something sells, they scramble back to press.

So who cares if Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin write books? The real story is that someone might actually want to read them. Let's focus our attention on those people, the readers, because they are the ones who decide what books to read, not Joe, not Sarah, and not publishers.