What if the book is truly dumb by everyone's standards, but yet it's selling like hotcakes due to an ingenious marketing program? Is this possible? How does it make you feel?
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Maybe some of us are perfectionists and should be more willing to publishing and promote books that are "good enough"?
A fundamental fact of the human race is that we are social animals. Whens something happens, everyone rushes to see what's going on. On the road, it's called rubbernecking. In the book and movie industries, it's called hype. In the news industry, it's called news.
The existing monolithic industries (film, books) have learned how to spin and generate hype. They pay people to do nothing but look for instances where word of mouth is occurring, which can be spun into what the new internet generation calls viral marketing.
An example (one of many) is what happened with Dan Brown. He had four (I think) good but uneventful books including Angels & Demons. Then The Da Vinci Code appeared, and something happened - it went viral. People became hysterical and had to buy everything he had written, including books like Digital Fortress that had nothing to do with cardinals, cults, and history.
Other examples include the pet rocks craze of the 1970s and the cabbage patch phenom of the 1980s. Skilled manipulators cause the public to almost literally go nuts, banking on this human characteristic of rubbernecking, being in on the action, need to see, news, etc.
I think some people literally were crushed to death in stampedes trying to fight over cabbage patch (ugly) dolls in stores.
So ultimately the question is: are people happy when all is said and done? I know of many instances going back many years where you heard people commenting, as they left the theater after seeing the latest epic craze or disaster flick, that they felt they'd been rooked. And yet they'll go back for more when the next media-hyped craze occurs. Most of the time, it takes vast sums of money and connections to pull something like that off.
There is a story that Jerry Lewis, the comedian, in the 1950s once climbed on a balcony in Manhattan in his underwear and played saxophone until he was arrested. He drew a huge crowd (today nobody would care), and made the morning news. Now there's a rare example of the individual entrepreneur crafting his own opening.
Sometimes the hype leaves people satisfied--think of ET, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Titanic. There is a place for this stuff.
More recently, people have commented on how utterly desperate and sweaty the NY book industry must be that the biggest crazy hit seller for Mother's Day was a book of S&M erotica titled Fifty Shades of Gray. I would not give my mother or my wife a copy (disclosure: I have published some erotica, and I am pleased that the author is a self-starting entrepreneur).
Yes it is possible. In the past, I have read many books that were hyped by traditional publishing houses, only to feel disappointed when reading the book. Even a mediocre novel getting a mention on NPR can go viral even if it's just people buying the hype. Consequently an excellent book that is under promoted could sink into the abyss, never reaching a deserved readership.
I learned a long time ago as an arts journalist that popularity does not always = an excellent read.
Sadly, Jeff, I would have to agree with Sharon. The public doesn't often hear about the best stuff out there, especially if they follow mainstream media sources or believe what they watch on TV. The education system in the US is crumbling, people stay inside safe boxes, and those publishers with the money and the authors with promotional support are who win out here. I wish we had a populace of original thinkers, but they are in the minority, not the majority.
I can give a bunch of examples but I'll spare you. Not bad books but not great books either. Just books with an exceptional marketing plan and an author willing to put in the time to promote it.
There are a ton of marketing and promotional services that make it a lot easier to market a less than stellar book and still sell a lot of copies.
One of the keys is to build a list of followers that have purchasd the book. This critical step is missed by the majority of new authors. I know because I missed it with my first book. Fortunately there are ways to build a list of followers very quickly that can then be sold the book.
Bottom line is marketing skills outweigh writing skills when it comes to selling books. Sad but true.
To my way of thinking, the marketplace gets to decide. If something is crappy, it will at best be a flash in the pan. But if it is able to sustain its success, then something about it makes a lot of sense to a lot of people; it's that simple. Many years ago people were angry when Beavis And Butthead got a huge book advance. But most of the whiners had never watched the show. I did watch the show and thought it had more insights and relevancy than most serious news shows that simply recycle propagated bull-shit. The market/public may not always know the truth, but they will always show you what's true even if some of us don't like it.
Yes, and right now what the market/public is showing is how inadequate most people are in doing any kind of critical thinking, and that quality has been dumbed down--a real slippage in overall literacy in my opinion. The market does not reflect what people want; it reflects what people ARE.
This passage in the image that I just posted on Facebook also applies.
Competition.jpg
The difference between a best-selling book and a bomb is still marketing strategy.
Yes, you can sell junk books (that very few people want) with the right creative marketing campaign. “There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse,” claimed John Ruskin, “and sell a little cheaper.”
Junk, however, has no staying power in the marketplace. Moreover, junk will not be subject to word-of-mouth
marketing, which is the best marketing you can get for your service or product.
Although I am not a big fan of "The Secret" I have to question whether it is a bad or junk product. In fact, I will say that it is an exceptional product. It had great word-of-mouth advertising and was what a lot of people wanted.
I also wasn't a big fan of "The Chicken Soup for the Soul" series by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. Again, I will have to admit that these books were exceptional because Canfield and Hansen gave the marketplace what they wanted. Results don't lie, in other words.
Why would you want to sell people what they don't want? That is dumb. It's their money and they can damn well buy what they want.
Moreover, if you are a truly spiritual person, you should be loving people for reading what they want to read and not condenming them.
When I see a successful book like "The Secret", I don't spend my time running it down. I learn why it is so successful. The point here is to refrain from casually belittling anyone or anything successful. American composer Irving Berlin, who led the evolution of the popular song from the early ragtime and jazz eras through the golden age of musicals, wrote more than 800 pop songs. One day Berlin gave a young composer named Cole Porter counseling on how to become more successful in the music business. “Listen kid, take my advice,” Berlin told Porter. “Never hate a song that has sold half-a-million copies.”
In short, if your own book is not selling, perhaps it is the one that lacks something important and not the ones that are highly successful such as "The Secret" or "Chicken Soup for the Soul".
And if you do truly have a great book that people want, take responsibility and go out and market it as much as "The Secret" or "Chicken Soup for the Soul" were marketed. Although junk books (that hardly anyone wants) can be sold with exceptional marketing, exceptional books (that the marketplace wants) are doomed to be stuck in no-man’s-land without adequate marketing effort.
When you have the rampant dumbing down of the education system and the utter failure of most North American educational systems to teach critical thinking, it's not surprising that "what people want" is syrupy tripe like "Chicken Soup" or pseudo-scientific delusions such as The Secret. The fact that those books sold so strongly is not because they reflect something "deep" that people want; rather, it's because many people are incapable of critical thinking, having never been taught the skill. So the readers drank the Koolaid because they didn't know how to distinguish it from real fruit juice. Or, in the alternative, I suppose if we were to go to the "what people most deeply want" theme, then we could conclude that people who buy Chicken Soup, Secret, and other equally syrupy books have a deep desire to go through life as a shallow ignoramus.
Unfortunately, I do believe aggressive marketing can outweigh slop on the page. It would be nice if more were critical of what they read. It seems to me that any aggressive marketing, whether for books, pills, cars, what-have-you is always a sign of a inferior product. If the product speaks for itself, all that money and time spent telling us we want it wouldn't be necessary.
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