The Readers Want To Read

The Readers Want To Read

A bit of a ramble, but I think it’s a valid point.

One of the things I have given some thought to, as my career has developed, is ways of increasing reader participation.  I’d like to have a self-sustaining community of readers following me – I can dream, can’t I?  What do you mean, no?  <grin>.

It isn’t easy.  Most of the things I could do to improve reader interaction would require me to take time away from actually writing.  I could name a couple of authors who spent more time writing articles than developing their work, finishing their ongoing novels and suchlike.  It works in the short term – sometimes – but readers slip away when they decide the writer isn’t going to finish the much-promised book.  And the days when I could afford to spend all of my time on the internet are long gone.  I have family responsibilities now.  Someone being wrong on the internet is no longer a world-class emergency <grin>.

The more practical problem, however, is that the vast majority of readers don’t want to do anything more than read.  They don’t want to do anything more.  My most successful book – Ark Royal – has sold over 120K copies.  However, it only has around 2000-3000 reviews on Amazon US/UK.  (I say around because the system doesn’t seem to draw any line between ratings and actual reviews.)  The reviews range between ‘great book’ to ‘what was Nuttall drinking when he wrote this piece of crud?’  But only a small percentage of readers bothered to leave any sort of review at all.

By my estimate, only 1-10% of readers leave a review (positive or negative).  Smaller percentages follow me on Amazon, or Facebook, or my blog. The percentage of people who engage with my posts is a tiny fraction of my readers.  And I think this is true for the really big authors too.  The Harry Potter community fandom is huge, but it’s only a tiny percentage of people who actually bought and read the books.  There’s a vast number of people who don’t want to write fan fiction, argue over Rowling’s politics … or do anything, really, beyond reading the books.

This has led me to a conclusion that flies in the face of common wisdom amongst the chattering (and shouting) classes.  The woke throw fits at the merest hint of cultural appropriation, characters who don’t match the author’s race/religion/nationality/whatever.  Judging by the amount of shouting on the internet, every time one of these teapot-tempests arises to poison the well still further, this is deadly important.  The merest hint of cultural appropriation – or whatever – is a crisis.  The author has committed an unpardonable sin.

Really?  I think – based on my experiences as both a reader and a writer – that the vast majority of the readers simply don’t care.

Think about it for a moment.  You go to a bookshop – or a library or Amazon or wherever – and you find a neat-looking book.  The cover could be anything from exploding starships to magic girls in fancy outfits.  The blurb promises action and adventure (or whatever floats your boat.)  And the author … you’ve never heard of him.  You don’t know anything about him.  Are you going to spend an hour researching him on the net, tracking down his bio and tweets and whatever?  Or are you just going to take the book home and read it?

The vast majority of readers will take the book home and try it.  I don’t think there are many readers, relatively speaking, who will waste time trying to decide if the author is worthy of their time.  Believe me, anyone who does that isn’t a true reader.  The readers will read the book and decide if they like it.  If they do, they’ll keep an eye out for more books by that author.  If they don’t … no harm, no foul.

This has implications that go a lot further than one might suppose.  Fiction is, by definition, fiction.  The average reader does not care if the writer of a book set in Imperial China – with or without the serial numbers filed off – is Chinese.  They don’t care if the writer visited China and researched extensively, or used the internet, or simply made his facts out of whole cloth.  They just ask to be entertained.  They don’t particularly care about accuracy.  Indeed, in some ways, excessive accuracy can detract from the story.  A massive infodump can break up the flow of the story.

Right now, there are people making a fuss about a novel called American Dirt.  Much of the fuss about it, as far as I can tell, rests on the fact the author isn’t Mexican herself.  I don’t believe the vast majority of readers care about the author.  They don’t care about her personally; they don’t care where she was born, or where she was raised, or practically anything about her.  The only thing they care about is the story itself.  Is it any good?

I keep hearing about writers being declared ‘problematic’ for one reason or another and it always makes me roll my eyes.  I am a reader.  I’ve read – and enjoyed – books by authors who disagree with me about politics, religion and just about everything else.  I don’t care about an author’s politics (or whatever).  If I like their books, I read them.  If not … there are plenty more books on the shelf.

And when someone comes to me and says ‘this author is bad, you shouldn’t read them and no one else should either’ my hackles rise.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions.  They’re not entitled to have their opinions treated as gospel truth.  (If you want to convince me of something, you actually have to convince me).  I know a gay man who complains about women writing slash fiction.  He claims the women – who aren’t gay men – keep getting it wrong.  Is he right?  I don’t know.  Maybe someone from a minority community can do a better job of writing a character from such a community than an outsider.  There’s a strong case to be made that that is actually true.  But trying to ban outsiders from writing such characters merely poisons the well.

Remember what I said about the readers not caring?  They don’t, by and large, know if there’s any author-related controversy unless someone points it out.  They might not take the controversy very seriously, even if someone does point it out.  What looks serious to the woke might be pointless to everyone else.  Or they might reason that they learned to love the author before the truth came out and they can hardly be blamed for not knowing something that was common sense at the time.  Or they might see the controversy as an unwelcome intrusion into their reading time and ignore it.  Why should they not?

The readers just want to read.  And they’ll pay no attention to someone who presumes to scold them.  And that, if you ask me, is a good thing.