Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Are Bestsellers Bad Books?
Are marketing departments, publishers' narrow focus on the bottom-line, and chain booksellers seeking to please the masses keeping good writing from being widely published? Prolific fiction writer Fay Weldon thinks so.
Weldon writes that "'Best selling' should not be an accolade so much as a warning. Today the danger for writers who continue to aspire to 'good' in the old sense [i.e., not necessarily selling the most books or winning a prize] is that they won’t get published at all, or it will be with miserable print runs. The synopses they must have approved before they begin a commissioned book will please marketing rather than the editorial department.
"Caution is the death of creativity. ... As the sequels and prequels take over -- if they liked that one, surely they'll like this one -- the creative imagination withers. "
Scott Pack (previously head buyer for UK bookselling giant Waterstone's, now commercial director of The Friday Project, a web-to-print publisher.) somewhat agrees, at least about which books are good and which aren't, but he contradicts some of Weldon's arguments: "A good book is a good book no matter what the genre or how many copies it sells. And a bad book remains bad, whatever the pedigree of the author or how many critics fall over each other to praise it. Quality is not always in inverse proportion to the number of copies sold. ... Publishing is a commercial industry and should not have to apologise for it. ... The money a publisher makes from the fast turnover of John Grisham or Patricia Cornwell allows them to invest in less popular titles that won’t sell anywhere near as well."
Labels: bestsellers, bookselling, publishing, weldon
