Researching the Self-Published Fiction Market

It is an oft-heard refrain these days that the results yielded by search engines are ever more worthless--that regardless of whether it is Garbage going In, it is pretty much always Garbage that is going Out--and that this is not least because the search engines, because of accidents of ever more complex design, because of the spoken and unspoken agendas of their owners or operators, because of manipulation by the chiseling, show us what someone else wants us to see--not what we are actually looking for, and what perhaps not so long ago they would actually have shown us.

Certainly I have experienced this time and time and time again, with a noteworthy case what happened when I was researching The Secret History of Science Fiction. In planning that book one thing I wanted it to cover was the implications that self-publishing has had for science fiction--and found it exceedingly difficult to find out anything about this.

In fairness the subject is intrinsically difficult to research. The category of self-publishing has its ambiguities. I had in mind specifically commercially-oriented self-publishing by people who are not established as professional writers, but this is, of course, not the whole of that market. (There is much non-commercial self-publishing, while there are also a good many professional writers who find it convenient or attractive to put some of their work out this way.) There is, too, the sheer number of producers, many of whom do not necessarily identify themselves as self-publishers--putting their work out under imprints of their own that at a glance may look no different from any other publisher's--while compared with the pros any organization is at best nascent, and so far as I can tell, no one taking much trouble to keep track of their doings.

However, my difficulties were also a matter of the search engines tending to, for all the reasons mentioned above, shove us toward someone who wants to sell us something, and toward "authoritative" sources over others--and how this interacts with what at least some people have to say about self-publishing, with the result that looking into the matter one encounters exactly two things:

1. People selling services to those who are interested in self-publishing.

2. People from the publishing Establishment, or who are at least representative of its interests (and so have access to "authoritative" media platforms), who see self-publishing as illegitimate, and relentlessly attack it as such.

So basically people who, assuming we are looking to self-publish, want to sell us something; and people who want us to believe that self-publishers are sinning in bucking Big Publishing. Both predictably strike a tone exemplified by how the author of one of the items I encountered gleefully titled his piece "Crushing Your Dreams." The people selling the service snarl that if we do not buy their whole $10,000 package we are just wasting our time for no one will read the unpromoted piece of crap we will otherwise simply dump on the market. Meanwhile the Establishment types snarl, in unbelievable bad faith given the lousiness of the professional product they extoll as so untouchable, and the complete lack of any way in for the vast, vast majority of would-be authors, no matter how competent, that the self-published are filth for not walking the "right path" of traditional publication. (They insist that any really worthy book will one way or another make it through the labyrinth--an absolutely unprovable proposition, presented on the basis of no facts or reasoning whatsoever, and completely at odds with the hard reality of how closed a world publishing has become to the unconnected outsider, but which flatters them as the deserving rather than the merely privileged they usually were, and conveniently lets them dismiss anyone who disagrees with them. "How dare you refuse to do an apprenticeship!" they yell--never mind whether apprenticeship opportunities actually exist.)

To face it, especially as a self-published author who knows that THEY MEAN YOU, is to be hit with a torrent of bullying, fear-mongering, insult and general abuse--and one can dig through all the words with which it is communicated for a very, very long time without finding so much as a single piece of real information about the matter. But then the paucity of information--the fact that we have such a hard time finding anything else--can itself be taken for an indication of the state of things. Had self-publishing emerged as a greater force in the publishing scene the champions of self-publishing--of the writers, and not the people who are so eager to make a dollar off of them--would at least be able to get a word in every now and then.

Remembering Double Dynamite

Some years ago I happened on the 1951 film Double Dynamite on TCM. It's one of those films that I find myself surprised to have not heard of before because the casting would by itself suffice to make it a curiosity--the movie starring Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx and Jane Russell together.

Still, that was not the prompt to write this post. What really struck me was that while the film's plot is a silly bit of fluff (even if this allowed it to be as good-natured and funny as it is) the situation was substantially rooted in a genuine, everyday problem--the cost of living, and what it means for a young couple trying to start a life together--the starting point of the story the situation of two young bank employees, Johnny Dalton (Sinatra) and Mildred Goodhue (Russell), who would very much like to get married and start a family, but with Sinatra's character inhibited by the fact that he can't seem to work out how they will be able to get along on their earnings. Indeed, before anything else what arrested me as I watched the film was the way Sinatra's character tried to compute everything as he sat with Russell, which actually had me recalling a similar scene in Hans Fallada's classic Little Man, What Now?

While watching the scene I found myself wondering when was the last time that a major (or even minor) Hollywood film, especially a light comedy like this one, was so pointedly alert to the problems of everyday life. To be honest, I don't think that anyone in a position to have a major say in the making of such a production today has any idea what things cost, especially for people like Johnny and Mibs--and don't much care, either. After all, even our journalists don't, as the folks at the "liberal" New York Times tell America's working people (as prices explode and their life expectancies fall!) "You've never had it so good." Instead at this stage of things such persons have pretty much all lived all their lives within a bubble of extreme privilege--while snarling at working class people who dare suggest otherwise about their "entitlement."

Hans Fallada's Little Man, What Now? and Dreiser's Tragedy

As I remarked a while back Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Karamazov Brothers is the novel to which I tend to find myself comparing Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, but these days I also find myself thinking of Hans Fallada's Little Man, What Now?

The cultural distance between Dreiser and Fallada is, of course, rather smaller than that between Dreiser and Dostoyevsky. Both were Westerners who were much closer in time (their books appeared seven years apart, 1925 and 1932). And both, one might add, based their art on the observation of an objective, material, social world (Dreiser a naturalist, Fallada a participant in Germany's "New Objectivity," a thing which was to make them unfashionable with the Modernism-worshippers who have so much marginalized them and their like within the history of twentieth century literature).

Perhaps for that reason the similarities in the situations of the protagonists are particularly strong. In both novels a young man of humble origins, alienated from a family of which he is ashamed because of how it has placed itself outside society's mainstream, tried to get on in the world--and have a good time. In the course of this that young man gets his girlfriend pregnant, and while they try to secure an abortion, the legal barriers that present no challenge to the rich in such a situation prove quite enough to defeat them. (Dreiser, in fact, has the reader comparing Clyde Griffith's situation to that of the lawyer his uncle hires to represent him--a rich man's son who, when much younger and in similar straits, was able to arrange the operation and just get on with his life, spared the dilemma that Clyde had to face. And if Fallada does not do the same he gives us no reason to think he thought differently.)

The result is that the protagonist faces a difficult choice. Clyde, of course, takes the course that leads to his girlfriend's death and his own trip to the gallows, while Fallada's Johannes marries his girlfriend (the crisis of the unplanned pregnancy the starting point rather than the climax of the book in Fallada's book)--and finds himself faced with only the beginning of a new round of troubles that are the novel's real subject, namely how a young couple might, or might not, get on in a very difficult world. It is a subject that Fallada, to his very great credit, treats as one who knows life at the bottom, and not only sympathizes with those who are there, but empathizes in a way that, as might be expected given the hard realities of social class and the opportunity to pursue an artistic career, very few major authors do. (I find myself recalling E.M. Forster's quip in Howard's End: "We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet." The remark said more about the Bloomsbury crowd, and what critics respect, than it does the reality, as writers like Fallada make clear.)

Thus we follow Johannes and Emma as, with the power in the situation somehow always in someone else's hands amid an insecurity that never gets better, that only gets worse as Germany and the world sink into the Great Depression and the fetid smell of fascism hangs in the air, and they struggle through one disaster after another--one change of job, one change of residence, one makeshift, one indignity after another that make a mockery of pompous talk of "choice" and "making do." The Hollywood film version (the book was so popular that the more cosmopolitan Hollywood of the '30s took sufficient notice to rate a major motion picture directed by Frank Borzage and starring Douglass Montgomery and Margaret Sullavan), if lacking the book's flow, conveys a good deal of this faithfully, but makes the concession to commercial expectation of tacking on a Hollywood happy ending far less convincing than the bleak picture we see at the end of the novel. It is less convincing still, I suppose, because of our later vantage point. After all, we know just how very, very dark things will get for Germany and the world; what their little son Horst will have to live through. Certainly Fallada found this out for himself--and produced a work about what it was to live through the Nazi era and the war that was at least as memorable, Every Man Dies Alone.

Hallmark vs. GAC

These days the entertainment industry's intrigues can seem more interesting than the content it offers up--and one such case is the rivalry between Hallmark and GAC. The Hallmark Channel, in spite of its ratings successes, never got much press--arguably because where the entertainment media lavishes its attention and its praises on "prestige TV," Hallmark has gone ever more in the opposite direction, emphasizing unashamedly conventional, crowd-pleasing, highly formulaic fare (just 12 plots for 40 movies, one reviewer of its seasonal slate quipped), and that of very specific types, particularly fluffy romantic comedies and cozy murder mysteries that, not least because so many of them are about a baker surrounded by baked goods, actually feel cozy. (There probably aren't a lot of things in this world cozier than fresh-baked baked goods.)

However, the channel could not escape the culture wars, with the result the fight that got the ex-CEO of the channels' parent company fired, after which, apparently, the man in question (William Abbott) has set up his own, competing channel of the type--GAC. Accomplishing the feat with the help of backers who, if anything, have made the whole thing seem even more political (Republican National Committee co-chair Tommy Hicks' dad's investment group backing the move, while the channel's commercial breaks are packed with Mike Lindell selling his pillows)--such that terms like "Trumpy" and "Trump-adjacent" are much heard in the press--GAC promises its audience a version of Hallmark that the old fan base, some of which has not been happy with the channel's recent direction, will find more satisfactory.

Of course, this is hardly a good time to set up a basic cable channel, given basic cable's commercial decline--and an even worse one to launch a major, high-cost challenge to an established entity in the medium. This seems all the more the case given just how far GAC remains from matching Hallmark, with a line-up consisting mostly of reruns of a handful of older sitcoms (like The Facts of Life and Full House). Their offering of anything new or different has been slight to date (a handful of Hallmark-style romantic comedies, the first broadcast airings of Netflix's Full House sequel Fuller House). Still, their picking up Hallmark's cast-off spin-off of its drama When Calls the Heart, When Hope Calls; bringing into that show's cast Lori Loughlin in her comeback role after her big scandal (which cost her her own involvement in not one but two big Hallmark series, When Calls the Heart and the Garage Sale Mystery film series); their signing so many of Hallmark's current stars to productions for their own channel (among them Jessica Lowndes, Jill Wagner, Cindy Busby, Jen Lilley, Merritt Patterson, Sarah Lind, Danica McKellar, and of course, Candace Cameron Bure); and GAC already making clear its intentions of going head-to-head with Hallmark during the Christmas 2022 season; suggest that for now, at least, GAC's management intend to go the distance in their endeavor to produce a serious competitor to Hallmark.

The Decline of Hallmark Mysteries?

The Hallmark Channel is a rare case these days of a media outlet which is successful while being profoundly unfashionable, producing the extreme opposite of "prestige TV." Rather than downbeat-to-grimdark edgelord material oriented to the obsessions of "the coastal elite" the channel (which has gone through an evolution), has specialized in fluffy romantic comedies with a sideline in cozy murder mysteries--as seen on the affiliated "Hallmark Movies & Mysteries."

Still, if it has had quite the wave of success the channel seems to be pulling back from the mysteries at least, recently canceling three of its series--the Picture Perfect, Hailey Dean and Matchmaker mysteries, with the cancellation seeming all the more final because the star of the Matchmaker series has signed a multi-picture contract with the channel's upstart rival, GAC. The same seems likely to be happening with the Aurora Teagarden series, with Candace Cameron Bure, long one of the channel's most prominent faces, now going over to GAC too. (I would also imagine that the Murder 101 and Martha's Vineyard series are also done for, with their stars, Jill Wagner in the first case, and Jessie Metcalfe and Sarah Lind in the second, also gone over to GAC. Cameron Mathison, who was in the Murder, She Baked/Hannah Swensen mysteries, is also gone over to that newer channel, likely indicating nothing very positive about that series' prospects.)

Meanwhile no replacements seem to have been announced--while it appears that premieres of such are fewer and less clearly intended as part of a series. (Cut, Color, Murder and Dying for Chocolate look as if they could be launch pads for such, but the IMDB pages for their stars Julie Gonzalo and Nikki DeLoach indicate no sequels in the pipeline, with the same, I might add, going for Lacey Chabert's Crossword Mysteries.) And the portion of the schedule the Movies & Mysteries Channel allots to reairings of its original productions has shrunk in favor of other material (like reruns of the same romantic comedies that are the main channel's staple).

Of course, basic cable generally has been less enthusiastic about funding the production of original content than before, and it may be that if Hallmark has been a comparative success story that success has plateaued or passed its peak. The numbers are still regarded as strong, but there is room to say that they are down from what they have been in the past, and many have cited possible reasons--as with other channels replicating its successes (responding to its notable success with its nonstop Christmas movies from late October to early January by filling their schedule with Christmas movies during the holidays, too), or blowback over particular decisions (with much complaint to be encountered online about the cancellation of their morning talk show Home & Family, while of course the culture wars are part of the story--they always are these days).

Yet I also find myself thinking about the evidences of a thriller market in decline. The Hallmark Mysteries, after all, are commonly based on literary properties. (One wouldn't guess it at a glance, but Aurora Teagarden comes from Charlaine Harris--the same author whose books were the basis for HBO's True Blood, in as good a demonstration as any of the big difference between Hallmark and the competition.) If that market is suffering--if people are less interested in such series--then it seems unsurprising that Hallmark isn't investing in adaptations of such material with its prior alacrity.

The Evolution of the Hallmark Movie Brand

I have to admit that, from a marketing/pop cultural/zeitgeist standpoint, I find what the Hallmark Channel does fascinating--not least because it is both profoundly unfashionable, and at the same time hugely successful (indeed, until recently a relative bright spot in the darkening picture for basic cable).

What interests me in particular is that as TV generally got edgier and darker Hallmark, whose brand has always been associated with "clean," "safe," "family-friendly" content, did the opposite--oriented itself to becoming more of all those things, turning itself into the coziest place on the TV schedule, with this becoming obvious when one glances at the romantic comedies that have been Hallmark's hallmark.

Not so long ago those movies sometimes had a touch of blue collar grit--the heroine perhaps a struggling single mother trying to make ends meet on a waitressing job, in a small town that reminds us of how often young people look to get away from them simply to get on in the world (as in the Elizabeth Berkley starrer Lucky Christmas). We might have a protagonist whose job-and-money situation at least is happier, but has still had her share of bad relationships--the film beginning with the calamitous ending of one (as with AnnaLynne McCord in The Christmas Parade). And the goings-on on screen might not be wholly chaste (with The Good Witch seeing Cassandra Nightingale spend the night with Sheriff Jake Russell--and on the first date no less--three quarters of the way into the film).

All that sort of thing has become much rarer here. The blue-collar grit is gone, the heroine pretty much always an upwardly mobile "career woman" with a spectacular office and wardrobe, or a flourishing "entrepreneur" who, likely owning and operating a business of some type that makes people feel cozy, enjoys a solidly upper middle class--indeed, rich person's--standard of living (solely on the basis of earnings of, for example, a large and luxurious bridal shop in a town with a four figure-sized population, precisely because such towns are now pretty much always bright and prosperous). She is very attractive, and so far as we know has never been uninterested in marriage or, as a single woman, short of dates, but somehow in middle age has no apparent romantic "history" or associated baggage--like a post-Pillow Talk Doris Day. And the film only progresses to its first kiss in the final shot of the movie. (I might add that it seems that actresses with the sort of associations Elizabeth Berkley and AnnaLynne McCord conjure up for those who recall their earlier roles are less likely than others to get cast in the lead, with Candace Cameron's being the network's most visible star for so many years exemplary.)

in the process what was already brightened and fairly sanitized became that much more so--precisely because there were plenty of takers for what was on offer, doubtless to the bewilderment and consternation of prestige TV lovers.

The Decline of the Thriller: Explanations

Considering recent bestseller list data it seems plausible that thriller sales have recently been in decline--not only this past year, but this past decade. Naturally I have found myself thinking about why, and two reasons come to mind.

1. Publishing was never an open field, but it is hard to deny that it has become more closed--less willing to take risks on new talent ("What's your platform like?" they'll ask before they ask "What's your book about?"), and more determined to not only stick with known writers, but exploit their names to the full so as to avoid having to look to unknown quantities in whom they would--horror of horrors!--actually make a long-term investment. (Every extra "James Patterson novel" in their schedule is one less spot they have to fill with something else.) And all this, of course, is without considering just how closed the world of the arts, media, entertainment has become to anyone approaching it without celebrity or connections (so that they do not even get into a position to be asked what their platform is like before they are told "No"). And any idiot can tell you what that means for the prospect of new ideas, or even just new properties, that might regenerate the field. Unsurprisingly the thriller genre is still pretty much where it was back in the '90s, with John Grisham and James Patterson and Janet Evanovich and the rest who had established themselves then still headlining the New York Times bestseller list with pretty much the same books, and even the same series', they were writing at the time.

Of course, in the quarter of a century since something novel did occasionally come up--the fashion for religio-historical mysteries Dan Brown spurred with The Da Vinci Code, the interest in Scandinavian crime fiction prompted by Stieg Larsson's success--but these fashions came and went fairly quickly all things considered, with Larsson's books, notably, having been first published in another country and even made into movies before American publishing brought them to a wide audience, hardly making them some New York discovery. We have also had more idiosyncratic thrillers like Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train--though precisely because they are idiosyncratic one can hardly picture a whole subgenre really emerging and enduring as a result. Simply put, the genre has gone stale.

2. Younger people read much, much less, and for obvious reason. No one under twenty has much memory of life before everyone was carrying a smart phone and its ever-growing package of entertainment options all the time, anyone under twenty-five has likely had one through all their formative years. The fact has already had its effect on YA sales (the readers who made Twilight a blockbuster were living in a more different media world than you may appreciate), and it is likely to take an increasing toll on the sales of books officially designated as being for grown-ups--all as older folk, likewise becoming more and more digital in their orientation, similarly read less.

Still, if fiction as a whole is suffering might it be that thrillers are taking a particularly bad hit? This does not seem to me inconceivable. After all, print fiction these days has a tendency to follow film--audiences, increasingly, having their aesthetic preferences formed by visual media, and expecting those preferences to be met when they pick up a book. And film itself has been changing significantly. Consider the thrillers we get on screen. Suspense thrillers, once a staple of commercial cinema, are now a rarity, supplanted by the action thriller--which these days is required to be ever more action-packed, with the action ever-bigger and filmed in ever more intense fashion. Indeed, even watching non-thrillers people seem to expect a shot to last no more than two seconds. This was not the kind of thriller that even a Grisham or a Patterson offered up--and it seems plausible that, stale or not, it simply does not hold audience interest the same way, especially when the medium delivering the content relies on words rather than a succession of images designed to strike the nerves directly rather than through the story they tell. The result may well be that, where in the past particular types of thriller have in the past fallen out of fashion, in significant part because of precisely this change (as with the spy novel and techno-thriller and paramilitary action-adventure in the '90s) the thriller altogether is suffering this fate.

Of course, that being the case one can hardly imagine publishers doing other than they have done—their current course instead of being simple stagnation a matter of resignation as they continue to trade on past successes for as long as they can rather than chase an audience that they know is not there.

This may sound overly pessimistic. But I do not doubt that publishers are quite capable of following such a strategy, not least because the editor of a noted fiction publication confessed as much to me in a private exchange. As the comment was not meant for public consumption I do not name either the editor nor the magazine, but it certainly confirmed my suspicions about how that particular magazine's staff selected its material--and how others might act in such a situation.

What T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is Really About

I recall the shock of my first exposure to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" in high school. After reading it I was convinced that I had just read a pile of nonsense and that the critics who esteemed this the Great Poem of the century were, frankly, deranged. And of course, no one was able to give me an intelligent answer to the question of why I ought to think anything else about it.

Eventually I learned what those I queried did not understand, or could not explain, or could not be bothered to explain to a "mere" high school student (or college student, or graduate student)--that it was indeed a pile of nonsense (as Eliot himself confessed, "In The Waste Land, I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying") and that its being a pile of nonsense was exactly the point. As one might guess from the fact that the poem's footnotes are longer than the text of the poem itself it was a mockery of critics who would attempt to approach its neutron star-dense mass of obscurities rationally and discern in it a rational plan, a rational meaning.

In all that "The Wasteland" was exemplary of Modernism, the essential feature of which is its rejection of reason and rationality and, if there was any thought of salvation at all, its pursuit in anti-rationality. Thus Dadaism, thus surrealism, thus the nonsense of Futurism in the Marinetti sense of the term, and, among so much else, Eliot's poem. Not everyone who produced experimental work necessarily shared these assumptions, but this was nonetheless this was the impulse behind the declaration that the older, more conventional, "realistic" ways of depicting the world would no longer serve, rendering these experiments a necessity.

I, for one, have found the intent dubious. After all, the hardcore Modernists insisted that reason had "failed" in a manner that a student of logic would at once recognize as "begging the question," for it was not so obviously a settled question that "reason" caused World War I and other early twentieth century disasters. Equally it was begging the question to declare that realism had ceased to be a viable artistic approach. (Think about it. When you read a realist novel, for example, or look at a realistic painting or sculpture, do you think "Ugh! That won't do at all!"? I doubt it very much.)

Moreover, overlooking this fact leaves us less able to understand what we are looking at when we are presented with Modernist work—hence all the critics butting their heads against the rock of Eliot's poetry--while the appraisal of the work also tends to be dubious. One associates Modernism with formal experimentalism, to the point that superficial discussion of Modernism notices only that--but considering this I long ago found myself thinking that experiments are judged by their results. They validate a hypothesis or they do not. They succeed or fail. But we never hear such judgment rendered. (Does anyone seriously believe that stream-of-consciousness writing "saved literature" as a way of approaching, depicting, understanding the world?) Instead, just as there is a slighting of the intellectual premises from which such work proceeded, so is there a slighting of the actual aesthetic results (which I must admit have seemed to me a colossal failure, and strained, ugly, failure at that) as critics then rushed, and critics today continue, to, accepting the aforementioned begging of the question as if it were the profoundest of thought, champion such work as the Good, the True, the Important. And it has seemed to me ever more the case that this has been a disaster for letters, culture and humanity generally--as well as yet another occasion in which few dare to point out the all too obvious fact that THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!

The Discrete Silence On Authors' Pasts

Once upon a time I was struck by how little is said of writers' pasts in those biographical blurbs on the back of the hardcover book dust jacket.

Later I realized it was because the biographical blurbs, in the interest of a sales-promoting glamorization, avoided a great many of the grimy realities of the writing life. Thus they do not bring up the crummy day jobs writers often work to pay the bills until they can get a break (teaching English, for example—indeed, I suspect this is one of the things that keeps college English departments in adjunct labor, in spite of the pay and terms).

Thus does it also go with the "crummier" writing jobs writers often do before they hit the big time. I had a recent reminder of this over at the blog Paperback Warrior, which covers a range of material (I have seen work as diverse as Jack London's classic The Sea-Wolf and X-Files tie-ins discussed there), but concentrates on older work from the "pulpy" end of the spectrum--old hard-boiled stuff and the like. Most of the items Paperback Warrior presents are books reviews, but the blog occasionally presents broader, more background-oriented pieces. The one I have in mind now served up an overview of the history of the Nick Carter franchise, extending to its Nick Carter: Killmaster incarnation--one of innumerable '60s-era reinventions of older action heroes along James Bondian lines, with the old detective become a globetrotting secret agent. The resulting series ultimately had 263 installments between 1963 and the 1990s-era collapse of the action-adventure market.

One of the more interesting aspects of the series is the number of writers who worked on it, often under pseudonyms, before moving on to "A grade" hardcover work under their own names, and sometimes becoming fairly big names. Among them was David Hagberg, who wrote twenty of the Nick Carter novels on the way to becoming a major name in spy and techno-thriller fiction with his Kirk McGarvey books. One did not find the Nick Carter books included under the "Also By" heading in the front matter of his books. After all, he was an A-grade hardcover bestseller now, and we were not to think of him as anything else.

Such facts make the eternal whine of the Park Avenue types about the public's misperceptions of the business the more ironic. They complain that the public thinks it's much easier to become an author than it really is. But they certainly played their part in creating the illusion by eliding, among so much else, the apprenticeships from the record that convert old hands into apparent overnight successes--and of course, one can hardly credit them with worrying overmuch about the existence of apprenticeship opportunities, which have been dwindling for a long time. They shrank with the disappearance of the fiction magazine market and its openness for short form fiction (as Isaac Asimov forthrightly acknowledged in Earl Kemp's Who Killed Science Fiction?), and then shrank again when the more limited opportunities afforded by the old paperback market, and series' like Nick Carter, shrank in their turn. In this way as in every other today's aspiring writer is very much on their own, with no helping hand to be expected from anyone.

Is The Thriller in Decline? A Few Thoughts on the Data

There was some talk in 2021 of thriller sales softening. Those discussing the matter gave the impression that this was some anomaly, but it seemed to me to be confirmed by the Publisher's Weekly data on the top-selling books of the year--among which thrillers were inconspicuous.

It may be that this is a temporary, anomalous development. But looking back over the top-selling fiction lists of the past decade I can't help suspect something deeper is going on here, the titles I see at least suggesting that the decline of the thriller has been underway for some time. Look, for example, at the list from 2010 (as archived at Wikipedia). Of the ten fiction bestsellers nine were novels, and six of those were thrillers written for adults (Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, John Grisham's The Confession, Tom Clancy's Dead or Alive, Janet Evanovich's Sizzling Sixteen, James Patterson's Cross Fire, and Patricia Cornwell's Port Mortuary). In 2011 seven of the top ten were thrillers. By contrast in 2012 the list was dominated by various YA authors (Suzanne Collins, Jeff Kinney, Rick Riordan) and E.L. James, with the principal thriller present Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl--notable for being a literary thriller rather than a commercial one (unreliable narrator, no built-in series potential, etc., etc.), with the trend very similar in 2013 and 2014 (with Veronica Roth and John Green numbering among the YA writers, and major films of the year generally having related works prove bestsellers, like Gone Girl, The Great Gatsby, Frozen), even if Grisham, Stephen King, Dan Brown put in appearances. After that point it seemed that the YA wave had crested, but that did not translate to a return of those thrillers to their old place here. Instead, where it was not simply a reflection of what was playing at the movies (as with Jojo Moyes' Me Before You), it was becoming a good deal more eclectic in the manner we see today.

Of course, in considering this one ought to acknowledge that PW changed its method of assembling the lists significantly back in 2012, and that it seems plausible that the decline of the thriller's prominence was at least in part a matter of changing its criteria. Still, given the other changes in the list's composition since (like how YA not only exploded but collapsed later) that single factor seems unlikely to explain everything--and leave at least room for the suspicion that there really has been a long-term drop.

The Decline of the Hollywood Western

In the early days of Hollywood the frontier, or at least frontier-like conditions in the western United States, were so historically near as to be within the memory of a good many living adults, with the effect all this had for efforts to romanticize it. Half a century on the subject matter was far remote--and increasingly problematic, the attitude toward Native Americans common to the Western, for example, less acceptable. (The confrontation between Sacheen Littlefeather and John Wayne at the 1973 Oscars--recalled to public consciousness by the Will Smith-Chris Rock episode--seems symbolic.) One might add that making so many Westerns for so long--making so much of anything for so long--made it overfamiliar while leaving artists with that much less to do with it that had not already been done innumerable times (the more, perhaps, in as it focused on a very particular period and setting, with perhaps particularly strong limitations so far as such genres go). Unsurprisingly there was less tendency to handle the material "straight," with films like The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Blazing Saddles, all bespeaking a very different, genre-subverting attitude.

Of course a trickle of such films has continued ever after, with something of a surge occurring now and then, most notably in the early '90s (with the commercial and critical successes of Best Picture winners Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven, as well as more modest success with such films as the big screen version of the old Maverick TV series, and a good many other efforts like Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead). Still, it went only so far and lasted only so long, and since then the genre has, its artier, lower-budgeted efforts apart, been more often associated with disappointing receipts and critical derision (as with Wild Wild West or The Lone Ranger) that only confirm the view that popular culture has moved on.

Yet there was another, more fundamental, factor worth recalling, both in the appeal of the Western in its heyday, and the decline of its appeal relative to other forms. Consider what Goethe and Schiller wrote in their piece "On Epic and Dramatic Poetry" (as translated by Evelyn Lantz):

The characters stand best at a certain level of culture, where self-activity is still left to its own resources, where one operates not morally, politically, or mechanically but rather personally (emphasis added).

Goethe and Schiller went on to observe that Greek myths were "particularly favorable to the poet," and so, one might argue, were the conditions of the frontier, where the apparatus and inhibitions and rules of civilization were a comparatively slight thing--what made for situations like those of Stagecoach, the oft-told story of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral (from My Darling Clementine to Wyatt Earp and beyond), High Noon.

As implied by the situations in all these films it is particularly important that it afforded a scene for individualistic action-adventure. And it is not irrelevant to the Western's decline that audiences found other milieu for such more appealing. Among much else there was a tendency to, in an era of hysteria over unruly youth, rebellious minorities, crime in the streets and the rest to see modern urban America as not so far removed from the frontier--and in need of a gunslinger (like a Dirty Harry, who, like the hero of High Noon, tossed away his badge at story's end). The attitude may have been more consequential still with an audience that found it easier to "get into" stories with contemporary settings. (Hence the boom of paramilitary action-adventure from the '70s to the '90s, and the preference for the adventures of superheroes in Metropolis, Gotham or New York to stories in more exotic milieu--like galaxies far, far away.) The result was that by the '70s the Western was not only exploiting an exhausted and increasingly challenged nostalgia, and itself artistically exhausted, but, as a cinematic staple on anything like such grounds, it had become superfluous.

A Note on Twitter Etiquette

I have noticed a common situation on some social media web sites, and certainly Twitter.

In that situation two people--let us refer to them as A and B--have an exchange.

In the course of this exchange A says something.

B puts A on the spot, demanding support for that statement as if it were their right to have it.

A responds by linking the source of their information.

B responds by saying that citing a source does not support what they said. This is in apparent obliviousness to, or disregard of, the fact that, even in scholarship, in which the standard for not only making a valid statement, but evidentiating it, might be imagined as higher than in a casual exchange between two strangers on social media, citing a source is accepted as support, at least so long as inspection has not revealed the citation to be irrelevant to the statement, or for some other reason unsatisfactory.

B's game gives away that they--very likely, and I dare say almost certainly--have no interest whatsoever in actually discussing or understanding the issue at hand because what is going on is not a debate, even an uncivil one. Rather B is pretending to engage A as cover for an opportunity to heckle them--possibly because abusing strangers is the idea of a good time of the degenerate in question, possibly because, while perhaps proclaiming themselves a "free speech absolutist" as so many do in extreme bad faith (they regard their right to free speech as absolute, not necessarily anyone else's), they have appointed themselves policers of the Internet's discourse, and are calling to account, and punishing, anyone whose "free speech" they disapprove.

If one really does take freedom of speech seriously--and I do--then I fear there is not much to be done about B's abuse of his right, save for A to refuse to play B's rather obnoxious and transparent game.

Reading Every Man Dies Alone

The Brooklyn-based publisher Melville House has accounted for more than its fair share of the really worthwhile titles I have come across in recent years--among them David Graeber's Debt, and the issue of translations of Hans Fallada's novels Little Man, What Now? and Every Man Dies Alone--the latter, in English for the first time.

Based on a true story, at its beginning Otto Quangel, a formerly independent carpenter who was ruined in the Depression and is now a foreman at a furniture factory, and his wife Anna, at the time of Germany's triumph over France in early 1940, receive word of the death of their son's death in action. It is for them the final straw in their alienation from a regime for which they had voted back in '33, and they launch their unconventional campaign of protest against the government, writing seditious statements on postcards and leaving them about their home city of Berlin.

Reading the reviews on Amazon I was struck by how many sneered at the plainness of the prose and the straightforwardness of the technique--middlebrows unthinkingly proclaiming their allegiance to the standards set by The Literary Authorities. Contrary to the pretension that a "good" writer will abide by the injunction "Show, don't tell," the reality is that a writer must often tell if they are to give us very much at all; and that good telling can be not only superior to bad showing, but extremely effective.

Certainly it is so with Fallada, as he shows in his capacity to imbue what can seem minor, trivial, incidents with extraordinary power. While I have read a great many works depicting oppressive dystopias I can think of none that so forcefully conveyed the sheer visceral terror of being watched all the time, and of even being suspected of having other than the "correct" opinions, as the scene in which Max Harteisen is flung into a panic by his discovery of one of Otto's postcards. Equally I cannot recall many occasions when a writer made us empathize with a character's sense of betrayal and wretchedness so keenly as Fallada does when depicting Eva Kluge's confrontation with her estranged husband Enno in Chapter Five. I was staggered by the swirl of intrigue he created surrounding the plunder of an old woman's rather modest apartment by rapacious neighbors--and what it revealed about the shabby life that made such trifles seem such a prize to them. The same goes for the exchanges Otto and his fellow prisoner, an internationally known conductor, have while locked up together after he is caught. The conductor actually has to explain what his job is to a disbelieving Otto in a scene that, more than any other, drove home just how little a share working people like Otto had in their country's celebrated higher culture. The result is that while the book is far from what one might expect from the blurb by Primo Levi on the front cover of the hardback hailing it "The greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis," for me, at least, it lived up to the high praise as very few works do.

More Real Reasons Why No One's Reading Your Blog

Writing on the matter of why bloggers, even good bloggers, go unread I have tended to emphasize two facts overlooked by the hawkers of generic and generally useless self-helpish advice:

1. The extremely high ratio of producers to content to consumers of content here, which is likely getting higher all the time with people turning to other media as both creators and consumers; and

2. The way the search engines, social media and other key means for exploring the Internet (due to many factors, not least the pay-to-play of ad-buying) overwhelmingly channel users to a small number of top-listed search hits generally belonging to long-established, massively-resourced, mainstream platforms, at the expense of everything else. This most certainly includes the newcomer, and even the oldcomer, who toils on their own blog, unaffiliated with any bigger operation, and with nothing but their actual words to offer the world. And all this, again, is likely getting worse rather than better.

These two facts by themselves constitute a grave disadvantage for any blogger, nearly guaranteeing that no matter how brilliant, diligent, deserving of a wide readership a particular blogger may be they will not find it. Still, that is not to deny that, even within the very slim chance of finding a readership this leaves the Internet does have its biases in favor of some kinds of content over others, and it seems to me worth discussing four that get far too little attention.

1. The Internet audience, by which I mean people who spend a lot of time on the Internet following things and getting caught up in dialogues with strangers on it (rather than spending time with friends or reading books) has a very, very short attention span.
When people blog, Tweet, vlog or anything else they are most likely to get attention discussing things of immediate concern--which people may get very worked up over right now--and then completely forget about by tomorrow.

2. The Internet audience is lowbrow.
Those things to which it directs that limited span of attention are usually quite stupid--for instance, one celebrity slapping another celebrity at a major awards show.

3. The Internet audience is intensely emotional.
People may not care about those lowbrow things they are always talking about for long (in a year will anyone remember the 2022 Oscars any better than they remembered John Wayne's far more consequential confrontation with Sacheen Littlefeather before the recent silly incident made it topical?), but they care about them very intensely while they do so, and they love the intensity, theirs and other people's. They love reaction, not cogitation. They love screaming and watching others scream--not thinking.

4. The Internet audience, as you might guess from 1, 2 and 3, does not like complexity.
Thus it does not like being required to, for example, follow a chain of reasoning or cope with data.

The result is that someone who shoots their mouth off about exactly the subjects that have the stupid "atwitter" for the present five seconds or so is much more likely than someone whose thinking runs a little deeper, whose brow is just a little higher, who attempts to discuss things calmly and intelligently to command an audience on the Web. Which I guess is par for the course everywhere else.

It doesn't please me to say this, for many reasons. But it does seem necessary to be frank about the reality, for whatever that may be worth to anyone out there.

The Constancy of the Thriller Market as the World Changes

As I have acknowledged many a time bestseller lists have real limitations as an image of the market--merely telling us which ten or fifteen or thirty books in some category happened to be selling fastest at the moment the list was made, while the listmakers' unavoidable arbitrariness in bounding their categories and roundabout and incomplete manner of collecting the data, and the susceptibility of the process to manipulation (there are now companies you can pay to get your book on the list!), leave the lists far from ideal even according to that standard.

Nonetheless, in the absence of better those of us who for whatever reason find ourselves caring about what fiction people are actually buying find ourselves relying on them rather heavily. Certainly such lists have seemed to me of some usefulness in tracking certain developments, like the way that thriller fiction changed profoundly in the 1990s, with the sales of political-international-type thrillers--the spy novels, the techno-thrillers and the rest--declining, audiences instead seeming to prefer more crime-themed, domestically situated thrillers. This seems to me to have had many factors--among them the shift of action-adventure away from print toward other media--but it also seems that the politics of the 1990s, and particularly the end-of-history mood after the Cold War, had something to do with it.

Of course that mood has changed profoundly this century, with old-fashioned great power conflict intensifying greatly--and turning very violent in places like Ukraine and Syria. No longer can one say that great power conflict is not on the public's radar. But is it affecting the public's interests as readers? The question sent me back to the bestseller lists, wondering if there has been a renewal of the presence of thrillers of the sort that deal in such subject matter--but so far I see little evidence of that.

Consider, for example, Admiral James Stavridis' novel 2034 about a Sino-American conflict. It hit the market in a blaze of publicity but I tried and failed to spot it on the Times' hardcover list (the book apparently not making any of the fifteen upper rungs for a single week).

Meanwhile a year after its debut it has a mere 8,000 ratings on Goodreads. Of course, the meaning of those numbers is far from self-evident, and it is not easy to find really appropriate thriller comparisons, because for a long time the market has had so few bestselling thrillers by new authors. It has been just Grisham and Patterson and Baldacci and the rest over and over again, often in the same franchises, with #20 in some series probably unlikely to get a disproportionately low number of ratings to its sales because it is, after all, #20, leaving readers with that much less to say about it. But for all that it is not a particularly impressive number by comparison with their work. John Grisham's Jake Brigance novel, A Time for Mercy, out at about the same time, scored over 70,000 ratings. Stavridis' ratings also compare poorly in this respect with the 24,000 Amanda Gorman's poem (a poem in an age in which "no one" reads poetry!) The Hill We Climb got--and, just so you can compare it with books that really got people talking, the over 300,000 ratings Julia Quinn's The Duke and I got (the first of the novels on which the hit Netflix show Bridgerton is based), the 391,000 for Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds, and the numbers for those continuing strong sellers of prior years, the more than 1 million ratings for Taylor Jenkins Reid's The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and the 1.7 million for Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads Sing. The result is that one may fairly consider the Stavridis book to have found a readership, but it is absolutely no event comparable to that comeback book for the genre, John Hackett's The Third World War, or the pop cultural splash made by the successes of Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts and others in the mid-1980s.

It may yet be that the Cold War's end, and other related factors, deprived stories of international conflict of much of their interest for the public--but the revival of those conflicts has not brought that public back as yet in any major way, and likely will not. At this point in time it seems to me that, in contrast with those years when Tom Clancy, Top Gun and Rambo became such a formidable pop cultural presence the thought of war leaves many who had previously gobbled that sort of stuff up weary, repulsed, frightened, and at the least put off by the way techno-thrillers and the like handled such material. Indeed, even Scott Mendleson at Forbes--no leftie publication, that--wrote that for Top Gun 2 to have "no more nuance or commentary on the current military-industrial complex than its predecessor" would be "almost morally irresponsible considering the times we live in" (emphasis added). Meanwhile, those who are receptive to unashamedly '80s-style content appear content to get it from their video games and TV series' and the rest, save for the few (I suspect, old loyalists) who still read Jack Ryan continuation novels.