What Matters Most: Readers

by Deren Hansen

The notion that the national book culture we once enjoyed—a consensus about the books everyone who considers themselves literate should have read—is withering under the assault of disruptive businesses and technologies isn’t simply an exercise in good–old–days revisionism: it’s actually one of the last gasps of the cultural monopolies created by trade publishers during the last half–century.

Through a complex web of bestseller lists, influential reviewers, English professors, and book clubs, trade publishers have attempted to create the commercial equivalent of a required reading list. The publishing ecosystem expends a great deal of energy trying to create a sense of urgency by making readers feel they are behind or missing out on the literary cutting edge.

While it is true that shared references are a cornerstone of culture, the idea that a book’s importance is best measured by the number of concurrent readers is one that benefits principally trade publishers and booksellers.

Tracy Hickman has been telling conference audiences for several years, “It doesn't matter if you're published. Being published is nothing. It is everything to be read.”

In the past, writers had to play the commercial lottery of getting published because it was the only game in town. Unfortunately, that system fostered an all–or–nothing mentality: your book was a failure if it wasn’t the talk of the nation.

Rejecting a manuscript because it wasn’t, “sufficiently commercial,” meant the trade publisher believed the book wouldn’t sell in the volume they needed to turn a profit. But that judgment took none of the needs of readers or writers into account.

An author needs readers, but he or she doesn’t need every reader. In fact, it is not possible to write one book that will appeal to every single reader. What is possible, thanks to the recent explosion in publishing opportunities, is to write things that will be read because the distance between writer and reader is now much smaller.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

LTUE 30: Tracy Hickman - "The Playing Field is Level between You and Me."

by Deren Hansen

Aside from a certifiably mind-blowing presentation first thing on the morning of Thursday, Feb 9, 2012 (about which modesty forbids me to say more) at Life, the Universe, and Everything (LTUE 30), I found Tracy Hickman's Saturday morning discussion about the sea change in publishing as he sees it to be the most thought-provoking.

Tracy made three key points:

• What makes you an author? Readers.
• The challenge now is to find your audience, not your publisher.
• The future of publishing is to find, connect with, and maintain your audience.

In the world before pervasive interconnectivity, getting published was the writer's holy grail because the publisher, who controlled the book distribution system, was the key to getting into the bookstores and ultimately finding readers. Now writers have additional ways to reach readers. More importantly, readers have ways to find and acquire books that don't include bookstores.

Tracy, who estimates that his fifty books have attracted about six million readers, told us how that lesson was made very clear to him when, on his last book tour, only eight people showed up when he signed at the largest sci-fi/fantasy bookstore in San Francisco but many more emailed after the fact to say they were sorry they missed him but didn't know he was at the bookstore.

"The playing field is level between you and me," Tracy said. "My readers were used to finding me in the bookstore, but they don't go there anymore."

It is both sobering and encouraging to think that if Tracy, who has paid his dues many times over, doesn't get a free pass to publishing success no one does. On the one hand, assuming we've written high quality books, you have as much a chance at success as I do. On the other, there are no guarantees.


Deren blogs at The Laws of Making.