The Changing Market

Fiction is necessarily a reflection on the present, even when it’s set in the future, the past, or some totally sideways world populated solely by centipedes.

Authors, editors, and readers all have a worldview, and their worldview is inevitably shaped by their individual and collective life experiences. For authors, that worldview creeps into their work, whether they intend it to or not. For editors and readers, that worldview shapes their taste in fiction, specifically the type of fiction they’ll buy and read.

The catch, of course, is that nobody has the exact same life experience as anybody else. The Beloit College Mindset List  provides a fascinating snapshot of some basic cultural changes, especially when you look at the way the list has changed over the 20 years they’ve been producing it.

Anyone who has ever argued with a friend about the relative merits of their personal favorite books would agree that individual people have different tastes in fiction. What is less obvious to many folks (until they stop to think about it) is that the large events that groups of people have lived through affect their attitude toward fiction, and to what they want fiction to tell them.

For instance, those of us  who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s watching the first moon landing and holding our breath as if that would somehow give the Apollo 13 crew enough extra oxygen to make it safely back to Earth (spoiler: they did!) are more likely to remember the space race as a grand triumphant quest, even if that view has been tempered by the Challenger and Columbia disasters and the development of communication satellites that are about as exciting as building the highway system. People born in the 21^st century missed both the adventure and the disasters (I’m assuming that most people who were three or younger in 2003 don’t remember Columbia except as a history class assignment), so for them, space flight is boring infrastructure with occasional robots-on-Mars and flyby shots of Jupiter’s moons from missions that were sent out decades ago.

Each set of people wants fiction that, on some level, fits their worldview and their values. But “space flight is a grand adventure” and “space flight is a boring routine” are not exactly compatible ideas that one can fit into the same novel, especially if one idea resonates with the author and the other one doesn’t. It’s hard to write an exciting plot about something one sees as boring; it’s equally hard to write something one loves and is excited about as boring background.

One effect of the change in reading taste is an equally constant change in the type of books that are available. Sooner or later, every editor changes jobs or moves on and is replaced by a new editor with different tastes (and different ideas about readers’ tastes), who buys different things. If those different things sell well, editors buy more of them. Since every editor is only allowed to buy a specific number of books, buying more X means buying less Y and Z.

This change in availability is usually incremental, hard to see when you compare this year with last year, but easy to spot when you compare fiction published in the last two years with fiction published a decade or two ago. And wherever the market is in the cycle, there will be complaints. If modern-day Romances are wildly popular, some readers will complain about the lack of historical Romances, even if there never were very many historical Romances published to begin with. When the market shifts from cozy country-house murder mysteries to gritty police procedurals, the cozy-country-house readers complain bitterly about the sudden lack of their preferred fiction, even if the people who like gritty police procedurals have been short-changed for years.

Fortunately for readers, we now have the Internet, which a) allows niche-market writers to make their work available even if it isn’t likely to sell enough copies to interest a major publishing house, and b) allows readers to find said niche-market fiction, if they’re willing to spend some time and effort googling it. There’s still probably less of it than an avid reader wants, but at least they don’t have to call all over the country to find somewhere that’s selling one of the only 500 copies ever printed.

Where writers get into trouble is when they don’t recognize, or aren’t willing to accept, that the type of thing they want to write is, or has become, a niche market in which they have to work a lot harder to make a living than they want to (or than they used to), and in which they won’t get the recognition they want because fewer people read it than read the larger genres. Epic poetry is not a thing you can make a living writing any more.

If the first thing on a given writer’s list of things they write for is money or recognition (every writer I know would really like more money and/or more recognition, but most of them put those things second or fourth or tenth on their personal “Why I Write” list), they have to write stories that lots of readers will buy and that will impress whoever is giving out awards. Most of the time, in my experience, this doesn’t work very well, because the selling, impressive stuff isn’t actually what they want to write.

On the other hand, writers who write the kind of thing they want to write and like to read, even if it’s not currently popular, often find an audience … and sometimes (not often, but sometimes) that audience is a lot larger than anyone expected it to be. Which is something I’ll talk more about next week.