The spoil* of the poor is in your houses

 

Dave couldn’t make the internet work (oh noes, teh webz are busted!) So these are the words of the illustrious Grand Doc Monkey, not mine.

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‘The spoil* of the poor is in your houses.’
*AKA’loot’
We’ve talked about super-readers, the small percentage of readers who buy 25% of the books. I am sure the reason we wear our underpants outside our trousers is because we’re reading when we get dressed, and we rush into burning buildings is because we’re late for work and we’re busy reading and don’t notice. (It’s a joke, Joyce.) You can read more about here -– look at William Ockham’s comments.

Now these are very valuable people, can keep the indy e-book sellers afloat, because it takes them 3 or less hours to devour a book, they want at least a book a day, and most authors take a lot longer than 3 hours to produce the next. And at a book + a day, unless they’re super-wealthy as well as a super-reader, the super-reader, is very unlikely to be buying $30 hardbacks (or $30 e-books, heaven help us). Yes, there will be “I just can’t wait” purchases and “I treasure and re-read their books” purchases, but it’s more than likely they’re very price sensitive for a lot of their books.
They’re food-and-drink to the little guy. But they’re also only 25%… which leaves the 75%. Now just as I consider the traditional publishing industry to be — if not barking mad (which is not hard to believe sometimes), at least blinded by complacent stupidity caused by being the only game in town for a long time, and allowing their narrow left-wing PC orthodoxy to say ‘we can ignore demographics and what people want, they’ll read what is good for them, AND pay $30 for the privilege’, I’d consider ignoring the 75% and only focusing on the 25% a short-sighted strategy.

Because, here’s the thing… As long as you have a decent product, and the price reasonable: You have a large chance of getting a share of that 25%. We’re voracious. If desperate enough we’ll read the contents of shampoo bottles or even Hugo award winners. (Do remember the sad puppies). Most of us will re-read favorites, most of us have preferences, be that romance, MilSF, or something telling us how bad men are, or the inverse – if we can find it. There are A Few Good Men out there.

But we’re 3% of the population (the super-readers, not the good men). Which leaves the big unanswered: ‘Where are the rest, and why don’t they read more.

It seems to be that it is heavily skewed – if you get to 15% of the population read 65% of the books (thanks again to William Ockham). Taking that sort of curve, by the time you’ve got to the upper 25% of the population who read, you’ll have 90% of the titles sold. Those who are left, are bestsellers and celebrity garboil – or traditional publisher territory.

So why? Well, obviously some people just don’t read. Some are too dumb, IQ on the wrong side of 90 and there are only so many times you can read Janet and John, and some are put off by what they were made to read and what they found available to read. Now, there’s not a lot one can do about too dumb. But the rest would both useful to quantify and to get.

Secondly, the probability of someone reading is strongly related to one or both parents reading – it’s a genetic disease, which in theory then should
spread. The hard question is: why isn’t it?

Thirdly, reading and education level are strongly correlated. That doesn’t mean that if you never had much schooling you shouldn’t read, it means if you did it should be very probable you will, and if you’re educated and don’t read, questions need to be asked. If a large section of the demographic who could handle more education aren’t getting it, maybe if those who like to campaign for these sort of things would like to have a go. Aha. I hear our dear little friends in SFWA all shouting ‘Yay’ and cheering, yelling for their pet causes… It seems the largest sector of the English first language UK population which is chronically demographically under-represented at university/college, and does badly in secondary education and I suspect the same goes for the US, is poor, (shrieks and more cheering) and white, and male (and almost certainly largely heterosexual). Why the sudden deathly silence? You want people reading don’t you?

Fourthly people read for various reasons –for pleasure, for escapism, for reassurance, for comfort. Each of those has a different segment of the population and of course there is some overlap. All of them require however, that the reader be able to identify with protagonist. If we’re getting such small proportions reading, I think it is pretty clear that we’re doing the latter wrong. Why and how do we change it?

Fifthly – reading is a cheap way to get the above. Competing for the beer money is still what we’re doing… and that unless you’re a very rich hot-house flower, isn’t 30 bucks.

Perhaps Jim Hines in his inept PC White Knight defense of the poor put upon non-binary gender ‘sheit’ (or is that itshe?) was accidentally right. We could get more readers if modern sf ventured out of its comfort zone, stopped being so lazy and stereotypical in its characters, and looked at the non-stereotypical ones that most of the establishment don’t ever write (perhaps because they don’t know any, and they’re far happier believing their wildly inaccurate and inevitably derogatory stereotypes), and took aim at those we’re losing or have lost. They’re a large group, a lot rarer in modern sf than bizarre sexuality (where we’ve had hundreds of examples going back 70 years cited in the last week or so), or odd ethnicity, or strange religions and much, much rarer than atheists. These are all present in larger-than-demographic proportions… No, we need something that establishment sf is plainly afraid of writing… In fact, the last one I can think of was Billy Danger in Keith Laumer’s Galactic Odyssey.
(Update: Retrorockets points out that actually character was black. So what. His color is irrelevant to the story, what is, is that he was an honorable man, a hero, who never stopped trying to do what he set out to do. And he started as poor to the edge of desperation. And yep, definitely heterosexual.)
When last did you read a poor, decent, hard-working, honest, white, male heterosexual conservative Christian hero from a SFWA member? I can’t wait to see Jim Hines lead by example.
It would be kind of fun watching their heads explode…