What We Read and What We Publish
Literature has changed dramatically in the years since the advent of pop culture. Every couple of decades something comes along and changes the way in which the world reads, whether it be mass market paperbacks, book clubs, or movie/television tie-ins. However, like so many other mediums, changes are happening more rapidly than ever in the publishing world, thanks largely in part to the advancement of technology and the internet.
Integrating further and further into a digital world, the everyday man, woman, or child has lost something of the fomentation for literature that drove the industry in decades past. That's not to say that books no longer sell. I'm sure Dan Brown and JK Rowling would tell you otherwise. However, with the growth of so much media influence and the effect of the internet on marketing and purchasing power, literature has changed substantially in recent years.
Who Writes
The stable of published writers that saturate the market probably hasn't changed much in the last twenty years or so. However, the stable of unpublished writers, who want nothing more than to become one of those lucky few, have exploded. Simply type "slushpile" into Google and you'll find millions of blogs, articles, and advice columns on how to get your book out of that vicious blackhole of literary limbo and into the hands of a good agent.
The writer boom is in part due to the boom of so many popular genre-style books. Stephen King was rich before he turned 25 and JK Rowling has become one of the biggest names in literature and one of the richest women in the world with only six books to her name. Writing in genre opens up numerous doors, not the least of which is droves of hungry, devoted fans who will read nearly anything you write. Don't forget the hundreds of television and movie deals that tend to strike much more frequently for genre writers, and the fact that genre fiction just seems so much easier to writer. Who couldn't write a good vampire book or epic fantasy novel.
Something else though happened only a little under 20 years ago which has made the writer boom that much more monstrous. The development of the personal computer and digital storage immediately made writing infinitely more accessible to anyone with a keyboard and an idea. Instead of the very "writerly" activity of sitting down to a typewriter or writing a novel longhand, anyone could sit down and tap out a few lines. Not to mention that when the computer became a regular artifice in every home, so did the typing proficiency. It might not seem like much, but can you imagine writing out the next great American novel while you peck at the keyboard with your two forefingers.
And in the end, you combine the dreams of grandeur bred by hundreds of successful horror, fantasy, and romance novelists with the openly available resources of computer technology and typing proficiency and you have the writers of today. The volume of moderately talented folks with a story to tell which has always been around but never had the resources to share their thoughts with the world has grown exponentially, every single one them hoping to break through to the public. If you look at Technorati, a popular blog indexing website, you'll see millions of average folks like you writing on a daily basis, some of them quite well...others not so much. Now imagine even a quarter of that population trying to write a book. Imagine a quarter of that population succeeding. How many books do you think could get published? Maybe half of one percent.
Who Reads
And so, with millions of writers setting out to share their words with the world, why then hasn't the publishing industry grown to accommodate. There are so many good ideas floating around that could easily be the next big thing. Why aren't they being published? Simply put, you aren't reading any of the ideas already out there.
The publishing industry has one major disadvantage to the other major cultural outlets in the nation. They cannot mass produce thousands of products every week and blanket the market. A book takes at least five or six hours to read and costs a decent amount of money. Movies are short and instant. They don't cost as much and tend to be prettier (lots of people still don't read...more and more every generation). Music is even more proliferate with the prospect of 3 minute songs and internet sharing.
Books are long, expensive, and complicated. Signing an author, editing their work, marketing the book, and selling it is an extremely long process and does not always pay off for a publisher, so they're incredibly careful about what they print. And the public just isn't reading much these days.
To get into genre fiction, you must be something of a genius with a story that blows everyone who reads the first paragraph away. If you look at the top selling writers on Amazon, 99% of them are previously published and most of the unpublished writers are non-fiction writers.
Which brings up the major point of "who reads" today into focus. Fiction is still popular, but not as much as it once was. The major areas of growth anymore are in the non-fiction fields, relying on the Blogger-centric mentality of so many readers and their perspectives. The world is a smaller place and people are more eager than ever to learn more about it. Likewise, writers are more eager than ever to share their expertise and the result is a massive boom in non-fiction appeal, only driven by the marketing of these such memoir-style books on television and in online forums.
What Works
No one really knows what works anymore when it comes to publishing successful books. You cannot simply rehash the same old ideas anymore. However, wholly new and revolutionary ideas don't tend to work either. People want some level of familiarity, and most of all they want to learn something, or feel like they are learning something. It is a book after all.
If you look at the most popular books in recent years, the DaVinci Codes, Harry Potters, and nearly everything Oprah recommended, people jump at anything recommended to them by people they respect. It's a word of mouth game and because books that are written well often transcend lines of demographics, the market is nearly endless.
Largely, it's still a crapshoot, because people are constantly changing. Fiction often appears at the top of the best seller lists, but fades over time, while Non-fiction will merely stake out a strong position lower on the list and stay there for a couple of years. Today, the generation of bloggers is starting to get into the game of writing books, and yet more ideas are finding ground in print.
When the industry figures it all out, I'm sure we'll see something of a new revolution. However, as the years pass and the fickle nature of adjusting and trying to read the popular notions of a massive pop culture becomes even more complicated, who knows what the "next big thing" will be. Maybe it will be your book on the mating habits of a particularly small Amazonian squirrel. You never can know.
