Men and Reading

Caroline Carpenter reports in  the Bookseller that 63% of men rarely read. I wanted to cheer when I saw the headline, because the man I live with finds reading a chore. He'll be delighted to hear he is not alone!

 The Reading Agency commissioned the survey of 2,000 UK men and women which discovered - if surveys can be believed, of course - that men prefer to watch film instead. The reasons (excuses!) given were - too busy, did not enjoy reading, preferred doing the internet. One in five men admitted to pretending to have read a specific title in order to appear more intelligent. It also emerged that 30%  have not picked up a book since their school days. Men read more slowly, read fewer books and  are less likely to finish them than women. If all this is true, I am left wondering why so many literary critics are male. Why not more females writing up the reviews in the press since we do more reading?

World Book Night, where volunteers hand out thousands of free books to reluctant readers in their communities, is coming up on April 23rd. The focus this year is on men who aren’t reading enough.
The list of books was selected with young men in mind:-

Hello Mum by Bernardine Evaristo (Quick Read) (Penguin General)
Four Warned by Jeffrey Archer (Quick Read) (Macmillan)
A Perfect Murder by Peter James (Quick Read) (Macmillan)
Today Everything Changes by Andy McNab (Quick Read)(Transworld)
Short Stories by Roald Dahl (Michael Joseph)
CHERUB: The Recruit by Robert Muchamore (Hachette Children’s)
Theodore Boone by John Grisham (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Humans by Matt Haig (Canongate)
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne (Vintage)
Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster)
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (Transworld)
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch (Orion)
After the Funeral by Agatha Christie (HarperCollins)
Whatever it Takes by Adele Parks (Headline)
Geezer Girls by Dreda Say Mitchell (Hodder & Stoughton)
Black Hills by Nora Roberts (Little, Brown)
Getting Rid of Matthew by Jane Fallon (Michael Joseph)
The Boy With the Topknot by Sathnam Sanghera (Penguin General)
59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman (Macmillan)
Confessions of a GP by Dr Benjamin Daniels (The Friday Project).

Once again, women lose out. Next year, why not celebrate women who read?

The best selling e-books of 2012

Publishers Weekly has an interesting article - OK, it came out mid 2013, and it's already 2014, so you may have seen it. But I've just found it and I want to keep it ot at least the link to it. I may want to look back at it some day. And there is a certain curiosity in knowing how many titles authors sold....

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/56408-the-e-book-explosion-facts-figures-2012.html

The magazine asked publishers for information on e-book sales. Because they were not specific enough in their questions, they got more info than they bargained for, but when they looked at it, they found lots of  interest. Here's a little quote:

"All the publishers that shared digital information were houses that rack up enough print sales to compete in the bestseller race. And while we estimate that we have more than 1,000 e-books with sales of 25,000+, we know this does not reflect all e-book sales in the book industry. Still, a look at this quantity underscores that the book business is quickly moving to digital. It would be safe to say that the lackluster performance in mass market has a lot to do with the fact that readers are enjoying the convenience of the electronic devices instead of the more traditional convenience of the paperback.

Also, it is clear where backlist sales have gone. Peruse the list and you will see double-digit numbers of titles for most of the bestselling veterans. Nora Roberts may be the most prolific in this area: she has 40 titles on the e-book list, adding up to about 3.2 million in total e-sales; James Patterson has 29 books on the list, with a total of more than 2.6 million; Janet Evanovich scores close to 1.8 million with 19 books."

One phrase leapt out at me: the book business is quickly moving to digital. 

In view of this change in the business, which after a slow, tepid start now seems to be gathering speed like the proverbial stone rolling downhill, I am now seriously thinking about publishing Matho's story myself. I can do it. No worries on that score. I can - indeed, already have, a cover that I think is good enough to be THE cover. The big worry is promotion. The stumbling block to self-publishing is getting the information out there. While I tinker about with yet another edit of the story, and finish off my Viking tale, I shall be exploring better ways of promotion. 

Nora Roberts and Success

The reading matter for sale on board Bretagne was not great, but I accept there’s a space issue involved. I wish they would open their bookstore as soon as people are on board instead of making them wait an hour or more. (I don’t know exactly how long, because I gave up after an hour and a half and bought a book from the even smaller section in duty free.) I chose The Search by Nora Roberts. Pricey at £12.99 for a paperback. I’ve read Nora before, and though this one held my attention on the ferry and afterwards, I don’t think it was her best by any means.

The heroine runs a dog-training centre and there is a good deal about dog-training in the book. It’s almost a manual. I found it interesting, but many won’t and will skim through the doggy bits. There’s a quality about this book that is common to most of her work - it’s full of dialogue; the NR short, snappy sentences. There's what I call the Area of Interest. Sometimes it's Alaska's cold, sometimes it's haute cuisine, sometimes its gardening. There’s third person POV internal thought: He’s cold she thought. Hungry now, and scared. He wants his mother. Next we jump into straight into author-POV on the next line: When the rain increased, they continued on, the tireless dog, the tall woman in rough pants and rougher boots. Her tail of pale red hair hung in a wet rope down her back, while lake-blue eyes searched the gloom. A year ago, I wouldn’t have noticed this, but now I do. Terrible writing habits, to skip between POV like that, according to the text books and my critique group!

The relationship between hero and heroine is much as usual – two handsome people meet, one or both has some kind of hang-up, reluctantly admit to attraction and gradually admit to love. All through this book I kept thinking of a previous book and hero. The connection was wood, for both are carpenters. The earlier book was set in the east coast mountain range where the heroine takes over a dilapidated mansion and has the local carpenter do the work of restoration for her. The bit that sticks in my mind is where he tells her not to go into a certain patch of garden, which she resents and heads off there at once; he stays where he is and says ‘Snakes.’ She gets out pretty darn quick.

So: the Area of Interest in this one is dog-training, interlinked with a heroine who once escaped being murdered and finds the killer is still after her. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit it, but I worried the killer would murder the dogs more than I worried he would target either of the protagonists. The h/H just didn’t personalize themselves for me in the way the 4 dogs did.

Somehow this one lacks the high PTQ (Page Turning Quality) of her earlier books, and could have been shorter by a fair amount. One has to wonder if Nora has got to that point where her publishers will publish anything she writes because it has an assured audience waiting to plonk down their money and devour the story in three huge gulps. I suppose writing is like any other business – you try hard to achieve publication, achieve it, plateau with success and then – does the quality go down as the mind runs out of drive and stories? Does pride make a person go on when it is no longer a pleasure or a necessity?

Or, and this is the bit I find fascinating - do we readers follow the same rise and fall – find the books, devour them, become habituated to the style, the quality and therefore lose the sheer joy they first brought? If this had been her sixth book instead of her sixty-first, (or whatever amazing number it is – 190 something, I think) would I be as critical?

Probably not, because she would still have that newness, that freshness (for me) that excited me. So, instead of saying Nora’s “gone orf,” maybe I should stop reading her and look for new authors to give me the thrill I want. If enough people think, like me, that they’ve OD’d on NR and sales of her books fall, then Publishers will probably complain that readers are faddy, and she will feel as if she’s failing. Seems like it's a negative cycle and I can't see how to break it.