Audience and Publishing and Tipping Points

If poetry is a religion, is publishing the place of worship?
If something can be hunted up even if people have no inclination to do so, does it still count as being on record? How many people reading means something is read? When can it be said that a writing has an audience? “For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst” comes to mind. [via Online Parallel Bible Project, wonderful idea, better than Bible Gateway, speaking as someone who used to cross-check thru various translations, notes.]
…online magazines…small photocopied press…big press…micropublishing of blogs…writing contest wins…what is public or private…what is on the same side?
It all counts, but at what point does it Count-Count?
Where’s the cutoff? Minyan requires a quorum of 10. If one is Hindu for any business to be conducted, quorum requires 20% of members in good standing*, or 50 members, whichever is lower.
* (please do the treacle trickle of defining that one on a figurative level for authors)
How many readers does one have to have before it counts as Published on the same level as what one counts as Published in first thought, that mental image that flashed with the word Published, the shape, that instance?
Being published by others creates a sort of quorum, a synagogue of council that can both help strain out the motes and cause more splashes so people know that another log has timbered into a page to make a physical or digital ripple. Word of mouth has more bodies speaking when there is a community behind a work, not just a single author.
I recall looking at a novelist several years ago who self-published his 600 page mystery-mystic tome and thinking, you poor man, you need an editor on every level and a crash-course in price point because even if it is brilliant, who will buy it at cost of $28? or $40 or whatever it was out of scale of price compared it its genre at nearby tables.
That was rushing to market with something not ready.
But what about when things are ready, refined, and brilliant, but whatever bat of the butterfly wings means the tipping point of gratifying level of fan audience clamoring for more, buzzing in contentment doesn’t happen when it should, what then?
Jasper Fforde had written a few novels could get no bites from publishers. He continued anyway, as many writers do. He wrote 7 novels between 1988 and 2001. As he got a few published, he was asked to take a firm hand in the marketing (which every author always has to be do anyway). His books don’t fit an easy niche of genre marketing plan that Stoddard had.
As he wrote more he came to the decision point of what to do next.

1. Quit? No, he was having too much fun writing.
2. Write books for market? He knew what would sell easily, was confident he could do the formula, match the bestseller list of books he didn’t respect. But nope, what would be the point?
3. Carry on and “to hell with it. I won’t hold back at all, just write whatever the hell I want.”

He went with 3, rightly enough. If you aren’t enjoying it, what’s the point? A laurel leaf in the forest of a mega bookstore when so much gets remaindered.
He ended up producing The Eyre Affair next.
When he read in Ottawa on Sunday, there was a 60-or-so-person-long queue to have their copies of his books signed. More than one person came with a stack of his titles to get them all signed. The line moved slow as everyone seemed to want a word, unlike some book signings that seem to run on speculative interest that the signature could make it valuable someday or someone wanting to compliment or support the writer without much interest in actually touching the robes so to speak.
There was something of a folk singer star thing going on. In the Q&A people had asked precise question about his characters and stories; they knew his stuff.
If there’s a ledger of published and unpublished, he’d be written on the published side.
Buzz as proof of published? Poetry is the religion. Writing is the religion. Buzz is heavy tipple into communion wine?
What’s on the debit or unpublished side of the ledger?
Unpublished seems to be jealously guarded virginity of view. Some calls for writing is for writing having never seen light of day – online, offline, bound together by yourself or someone else, presumably never even a handwritten on scraps of paper dropped on the street, read aloud, perhaps, after a security patdown for preventing recording devices, then heard by candlelight and private audience, sworn to secrecy so the publisher is absolutely the first to unveil. Silly legalistic romanticism.
Where does the idea of them and us for published and unpublished and really published come from? Why are there sides, gatekeeper, entry fees, intercessors between the people and the god of worthwhile to spend one’s life moments on?
The economics of attention and scarcity mapped to dollars mapped to style of voice. I know for myself if I like a style of writing, I will read any subject. A good writing perspective that feeds me how I want to be fed and my curiosity to know will be led to anywhere.
Conversely, if I love a subject, am filled with curiosity about it, but the voice, or font, or even hand-feel of the media puts me off, I won’t consume it.
What snowballs is of a responsive scale to what readers want. It seems a matter of connected consumption at play. People say what they want with voice or with wallet. It encourages a certain direction of reward and creation. At the same time the writer is trying to train and educate the market to like more sophisticated things as they would prefer to make. There’s a mutual tug. If the publishing is too disconnected from the audience, the scope of exposure is broad and bland, like who knows about eggs and the niche can be bigger scaled, more profitable. People don’t really care if it is eggs from one farm or the other. They just want to fry one up and toss it back.
If the publishing is connected to particular tastes, there’s a mutuality of interaction there. It can snowball outside its niche, a cult favorite goes mainstream now an then. People can get loyal to that particular brand from grass roots level. The small independent published item is like a feeder school, a training area, a niche where most are more likely to stay inside its confines or original audience. I’m postulating. Some say some mainstream books go more straight there by luck of who is known, by what tipping point ambassador is met. No one is an overnight success tho. It’s simplistic to see small press as people doing their time, or as incompatible with large press.
Is mass media and populist in opposition to honor and dignity and “real” and indie a marginalized niche? It seems rather cracked, if for no other reason that it asserts a projection of hierarchy and it denigrates people who put work and fun, life and talent, into making something lighter that can be more on the base of the brain food pyramid.
People do consume light reading, do eat a bulk of media, communication of ideas that are fast and tasty. It loops back to the idea of a second rate novel giving you all you will get in the first pass. A high literary success has shadows that shift. But we need both. Anyone who reads reads fluff of newspapers and magazines and pulp fiction, and heavier things that makes them feel different, think differently, make them think. It’s like high fibre food. You can’t live as well on white-flour carbs alone. (or bread alone) You can’t live on bran and roughage. Switching too fast between either isn’t a good idea but mixing both continuously works.
We use the same word for fibrous food as fast food, so far as it’s only adjectivally different. There’s a morality imposed on food and on books that one is superior. The way it is consumed might be more of an issue than the food or ideas inherently.
But let me return more centrally to the idea of publishing. The Giller prize must have been invoked 6 or 8 times over the festival, in chats, on stage, all with the same sour sniff of putting it down, and the writers. All in good fun like any denigration? That bugged me. I don’t care if something is to my taste or not but tasteless putdowns of life work, that moralistic evaluation as verbally pissing on someone’s work isn’t productive. Some people like it. Let’s just stay on the positive side without barbed jabs which are just ugly.
Stepping back to broader, Is publishing a meaningful term?
Only if it includes dissemination, er, distribution? There’s something of a tree in a forest phenomena. Who counts as hearing? If the squirrel notes a tree outside her usual circuit of caring falls, does that count as being observed?
The Relit Award is for Canadian indie press. It had some good, polished and interesting ideas written, some great performing/presentation of the writing, good engagement by people in audience.
But it bothers me that the quiz to give away books went as it did.
What’s another title by this author?
Who is the publisher?
Where was it published?
And there was crickets. *
Anyone here who likes horses? became the question for someone to answer to get one book. Do you want to try this subject became the question type.
*Except for rob who has all the inventories in his head. And the people who repeated what he said to win the books.
But why don’t people know? Why is this not at hand for everyone?
Perhaps I’m sensitive to this from being in that position of of the host and got a bodily flashback to reviewing the basics covered in class to receive blank looks. C’mon people. It seems a gap in literacy somehow.
Why don’t you know? Your presence here shows you must care. (Is that a non-sequitur? )
What makes something leap into collective awareness? How does one as a reader decide to attend to one writer more than another?
When is it publishing success of scale? Is that just a by-product of misreading the scene? We need them all. They all nourish. How do we measure? In dollar sales? In quality of audience reached? In quality of skill of writer reached? In how it enters popular thought, stripped of who said it because it is such a useful concept or turn of phrase that it loses its origins? What constitutes mainsteam?
What makes one excellent book go to the big press and another excellent book go to indie press? What creates the economics of taste, the demographics of collective individual consumption? Is it craft, or savvy media craftiness, happenstance of butterfly wings?
What ratio at what timing? Is it even mappable to reconstruct with all the variables, the individual moments of dozens of tens of thousands of people involved, each fickle and passionate, tired and energetic, fitting all the other bits of life together with books? It’s not random but hardly wranglable either.
This publishing thing, is it riding the demons? wrestling angels? being caught up in the spirit? or something far more grounded, less mystical, just as workaday as masonry, as government, as childcare, as silicon-chip design, as whatever it is that your relative does that they can’t explain to someone outside the field or even outside their branch? A way. A thing. Complex, a life, a lifestyle, with a mix of order and higgley piggly improvization at every level…?