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| Spring woods at Manning Floral Reserve |
On the other hand, my romance with the Canon EOS continues apace, and I'll illustrate the main body of this post with photos that depict that romance, rather than just babbling about a camera and the places we've visited. In fact, we're going to all the same old places, albeit with a new camera. And even this was fraught with not-so-good luck. We were on our way back from Nangawooka just yesrerday. Bam! One hell of a bang, at highway speeds, and, just like that, we need a new windscreen. It was only this morning when we discovered (phew!) it's covered by our insurance. Praise RAA, may blessings be upon it. Now --
The main subject of this post is a ramble about books, writing, reading, publishing, and selling the dang things. Here we go.
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| Noisy Miner, Milang |
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| Purple Swamphen, Strathalbyn |
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| Ripe brambles, Belair NP |
...just lately, I've been listening properly to what people are saying about the books they love, and matching those remarks to the books themselves, and to the success of those books. Because the success of a book at market is a geometric measurement of its saleability, yes? Yes. By looking at YouTube, and reading Goodreads, and then actually buying and reading the books (!), I can say, without hesitation or fear of contradiction, that the quality of the writing -- the prose, the structure of the narrative -- has nothing to do with the success of a book these days. Perhaps in the past, it did, not now. Now, it's all about the story, plus how and why the central characters strike a chord with the reader, and how easy the book is to read. Ease of reading is more important, apparently, than good grammar. Characters with whom younger readers identify and empathize are more important than a well-written and well-structured book. O...kay.
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| McLaren Vale Visitors Centre |
Like it or not, this is how the market shakes down in today's reading world. Publishers only exist to sell books, and they have to be able to sell them -- which means a writer has to be able to supply what readers will pay for (and this in a world where you would read forever without buying anything, because billions of words are archived online), which of course kicks back through the whole machinery, the train of reader - bookseller - publisher - agent - writer. It comes down to the inescapable bottom line: it's the reader, the end-user, who is driving the market. Publishers know this. They tell agents what they want. The agents select from a never-ending Niagara Falls of submitted material, choosing just what they think (guess; judge; hope) will woo the reader to spend $12 for this book in a year or two. So --
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| blossom, Strathalbyn |
-- just what is it that this hypothetical end-user wants, and will spend a few bucks on? To answer that, you have to know who the end-user actually is. It might be a middle-aged man who wants a non-stop supply of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler. It could be a septuagenarian lady who wishes there were a hundred novels on Colleen McCullough's backlist. But if you want the real money, today -- the kind of royalties that come from millions of books sold, well...
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| canola, near Milang and Langehorne |
...any one writer can't write to all of those marketplaces. A twenty-something woman who writes romantic fantasy (a cross between Harlequin Romance and Game of Thrones) probably can't write to Tom Clancy's readership with any hope of seeing the real money we all need to pay the rent, and vice versa. The writer is pretty much compelled to pick a marketplace and write to it. There's an old saying: "A writer must write of what she knows." (Yes, I know the original saying was "he," but I'm not a guy, and in today's world, everything is trending female.) So, being a female, I started to look at what women are reading, and which women are reading, and how much they're reading. Hmm. This is where it gets interesting.
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| full moon, stormy sky, from the backyard |
It turns out that the big-success sellers among female readers are aimed at the New Adult market, or the late-late YA range, where kids are so close to grown that it's difficult to draw a line. I chased down three recent, real successes: the Leviathan trilogy (not so much this one, actually) the Hunger Games trilogy (this was big), and the ACOTAR series. A Court of Thorns and Roses ... the one that's being banned left and right in school and college libraries in the US. Yes, that one.
Now, Leviathan was written by a middle-aged male, and after reading it -- and having various misgivings about the apparent "childishness" with which the mid-teen characters were written, I followed the book to Goodreads and -- whaddaya know? Young(er) readers are saying the same thing. Scott Westerfield is writing for the kids he remembers from 25 years ago, not kids as they are today. I thought Leviathan was really good, but it's the kind of book that a parent buys for their 12 to 15-year-old, likely not the book kids would buy for themselves. This isn't to say it's not a terrific read -- it is. But it would suit readers several years younger than the age of the main character, but 11 or 12 is not the lucrative marketplace where kids have bucks for books and are actively out there, looking for them ... hunting, in fact, for the books they're all talking about at school. But Leviathan is on the right track, centring as it does on a young woman coming of age and making her mark in a man's world -- in fact, in this context, a steampunk First World War scenario.
Hunger Games, meanwhile, is the kind of novel that gives parents nightmares while mid-teens revel in it. Dark, dismal, cruel, violent, with a thread of awkward, dawning romance, hints of sensuality, though there's nothing overt in the first one, where the central character is 16. The violence and cruelty are deliberate, often heavy-handed. Suzanne Collins was definitely writing for mid-late teens, and knew her target audience. Really, seriously knew them. She was older than this at the time when these books were written -- I believe she'd have been 45-ish, whereas her readers would have been 16-23, either the same age as the female hunter/warrior who is central to the story, or just a little older and easily able to look back and remember being that age. Hunger Games was also filmed as a major movie trilogy, so, whereas Leviathan was on the right track, safe to say, Hunger Games nailed it. For a start, the first book sold 800,000 copies, which is getting up there, although nowhere near what can be, and has been done, by other writers in a similar vein...
Take it to the next level. A Court of Thorns and Roses has several things in common with these other two projects. It's aimed at young and very young readers (Hunger Games scored; Leviathan missed the target by a whisker but hit the parents and grandparents instead, meaning it would be gifted at Christmas and birthdays ... not enough to drive a monstrous bestseller, but not too bad at all). It's dark. It's violent. It's cruel. It's written in a prose style that is so stripped and bare, it's often gauche, clumsy, amateurish (and indeed, in ACOTAR, one finds a blizzard of grammatical errors, wrong-word errors, non sequiturs, incorrect word order ... the kind of mistakes a good editor should pick up and correct. This was not done, and one speculates that the sheer clumsiness of the narrative line is some kind of "youth speak," where this is the language in which one speaks to, and with, readers aged 16 to 23 -- i.e.., the work's target marketplace). And a young girl is the central character: in ACOTAR, the action pivots on Feyre Archeron, who is about 18 or 19, and who tells the whole saga in first person, past tense.
A pattern emerges.
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| Roo, Happy Valley Reservoir |
Highly successful fiction these days tends to have female heroes. Young female heroes. Very young. They're hunters and warriors, fighting against the odds. They're mostly impoverished, borderline starving, underdogs, struggling against the current in a male world. It's a dark world, brutal, cruel, dystopian. War is either looming, is happening, or has happened. These teenage girls are without exception strong, athletic, also probably stunningly beautiful into the bargain, though they themselves don't (yet) know it. They're indomitable; they also appear to be indestructible -- which is a direct holdover from generations of movies and television, a trend that began with Leia Organa, continued through Ellen Ripley, Sidney Bristow, Peggy Carter, Rose Tyler, forged ahead through Daenerys Targaryen ... and the pedigree culminates in our own decade with the aforesaid Feyre Archeron and Katniss Everdeen. Young. Stunning. Indomitable. Indestructible.
There is one more level that this archetype can be taken to, and Sarah J. Maas was the writer with the foresight and the guts to do it. Oh, it's been tried before, but the marketplace had to be juuust right before it was going to work like magic. You take the above formula, as explored by Leviathan (characters written too young, by a Dad figure who slightly misread his readers) and Hunger Games (the narrative explores romance; the writer pulls up short of crossing the line into more adventurous territory that might get the book(s) banned in school and college libraries), and yep -- you add sex. The explicit variety, which has been what teens have always really wanted, irrespective of what parents, teachers and priests have preferred to believe. Hey, I was a teen once myself. It was many, many years ago, and even then, my peer group was smuggling porn to school, albeit books and magazines whereas nowadays it's all about phone-driven images and videos, served by websites that may not even be legally available to younger kids. Legal or not, the stuff is circulating, and over the last decade, kids have lapped it up, with the result that teens are maturing faster and faster -- fast enough, in fact, for parents and teachers to be left behind and choking on their dust. Their kneejerk, in the US, is to ban the books. No surprise there
(I'm not here to debate the merits of growing up fast, or at what age curious, hormone-driven teens should be legally entitled to access adult entertainment. I'm too old to intuitively know where teenage heads and hearts are today. Neither am I an educator, parent or even grandparent who has contact with them to learn where those hearts and minds are, and what they might want and need. All I would do is offer up an outmoded opinion, sound like the dinosaur I probably am (chuckles), while adding nothing useful to a debate that belongs to other, better suited individuals.)
You take Harlequin romance (the Mills & Boon style of frills and swoons love story). You hang it on an indomitable, indestructible, impoverished, starved, barely educated, stunningly beautiful 18 year old girl with a bow and arrow. Now, you set the story in a dark, dystopian, cold, muddy, male dominated future under the shadow of war. Last step: add sex. Did Sarah J. Maas invent this? No. People have forgotten than Daenerys Targaryen was about 14 when her brother sold her to Kahl Drogo. Sure, she went on to be the Mother of Dragons who burned down empires, but she began right where the others began, with such preplanning that it would be fair to say George R.R. Martin was the first who took fantasy to the next level ... except that A Song of Ice and Fire is not "frills and swoons romance."
What Ms Maas did was to read her marketplace with genuinely awe-inspiring precision. Your readers are female, 16 and hormonal; they love Game of Thrones, Witcher, Carnival Row, Lord of the Rings; they're steeped in fanfiction, reading millions of words of largely-unedited amateur writing; this is their main source of sexy romance; unpolished prose speaks their language ... either that, or they honestly can't see the grammatical gaffes, the errors in the writer's craft. ZTF Zero Tolerance for Punctuation, yes? Your reader is looking for something that speaks their language, tells a vast, windmilling, fastasy saga about an 18 year old girl who's (!) indomitable, indestructible, impoverished, starved, barely educated, and whose feet are on the path that leads to tearing down empires.
A pattern emerges. And it sells -- ooooh, a lot of copies. ACOTAR is five books long, and each volume has sold about two million, in 38 languages. Okay, so that's the formula. It's the formula devised from actually listening to readers, respecting what they say, and reading the books with an open mind. Sure, I can see every single grammatical and writing gaffe, and I'm not going to criticize, because Ms Maas is the one who has sold 38,000,000 copies while I'm still wondering if I can score an agent! I have no taste for sour grapes.
But I do wonder how The Gift of Prometheus should be crafted. Oh, yes, I do wonder.
And that's where I am at this point in time! Just finishing the treatment version of a novel, and beginning to wonder -- with a somewhat mercenary train of thought -- how it should be crafted to appeal to a readership that's looking for something "new but the same." One only writes for the sheer fun of it up to a certain point. Past that point, one has bills to pay. One would like to buy a house in the country! This particular one would like a facelift, lol, and there's forty grand before we launch ourselves off the starting blocks! So --
Vale Black Caviar. May you run forever where the stars meet the greenest grass ... thank you for the memories. It was ... glorious. Nothing short of glorious.
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