Who's going to buy your book?
The vanishing etiquette of paying the ticket price for author talks
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I write this post with my recent trip to Sweden in mind, during which I sold a total of six books over four separate events, and I write it with an understanding that nobody owes me anything. This post is nothing more than an observation of a behavioural shift which seems to have occurred in the last 25 years of my reading and writing life. And as writers, human behaviour is always of interest to us, or at least it ought to be.
The first truly memorable author talk I attended was Margaret Atwood back in 2000. It’s quite easy to pinpoint, because I’d just met my eventually-to-be husband and he came along to the event. Up until then I’d been rootless and restless, travelling and dancing, going to an awful lot of concerts, and spent five years reading and writing for my BA and my MA. And I’d read The Handmaid’s Tale.
If you’ve ever been to listen to Atwood you’ll know that she’s a lighthouse of reason, and she’s funny, and she speaks for women. In fact, the whole of Brighton Dome was full of women, aside from my eventually-to-be-husband, who wasn’t at all intimidated.
This talk transformed me. Not only did I buy and read as many of Atwood’s books as I could lay my hands on, I realised that going to listen to authors was a thing, in particular in Brighton. Another talk I went to was Lionel Shriver, also in the Dome. She held a lecture entitled Who needs another book in which she outlined the changing state of the book market and how to think when writing a book. This talk by Shriver is what made me switch up a gear in my own writing, because I felt like I’d been handed a set of keys.
But I didn’t only go to listen to the big names, I went to smaller talks too, anything that caught my interest, and I’d always buy the book and get it signed. Partly because it still seemed like magic to me, a child from the forest, that this could happen. You could go and meet an author and get your book signed by them. But also to buy the book seemed to be the etiquette, in particular for these smaller, free events, where buying the book was in lieu of paying for a ticket that would otherwise have funded the event and supported both the bookseller and the author.
I don’t think I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses, because I remember always standing in a queue of some sort. The longest one being Markus Zusak at the peak of popularity of The Book Thief, and the shortest being a graphic novelist, but there were nonetheless a queue of about seven people.
Then came a gap of several years when I had young children and was working and trying to write my own stuff, and I simply didn’t get the opportunity to attend author events, or do much of anything else.
Now let’s fast-forward to 2023 when my own debut novel, The Shape of Guilt, was published. The launch was in Waterstones in Brighton where I’d been buying books and attending author talks for over thirty years. Over a hundred people attended and over a hundred books sold. Forget children being born, this was easily the best night of my life. What I didn’t quite manage to process at the time was that the people present were family, friends and acquaintances who knew how hard and stubbornly I had worked, who were invested in me and who’d come to celebrate this achievement with me.
My next event as a newbie author was a free event in a different bookshop and the audience consisted of about thirty creative writing students, and I will confess that based on my own past experience of attending author events I expected as many sales. So I spoke about my book, my journey towards publication, did my reading and answered questions, but at the end of the evening there was no queue, and only one person bought my book, a person who may or may not have felt sorry for me.
It became instantly clear to me that during these years I’d spent not going to author events, a shift had happened in the attitude to both reading and writing, and indeed soon afterwards I came across a study (in Swedish) into this shift in patterns. Being an author is now the dream profession. Apparently one in three (in Sweden) want to write a book. I can no longer find this study to share with you, but what I remember from it is that being well-read, being able to quote other authors, having philosophical discussions and bookcases crammed full of books, being able to talk about who influenced who and the merits of one book against another, writing reviews and opinion pieces used to be seen as something prestigious.
Now reading books has become a secondary activity, not even considered necessary by a worrying number of writers. Deep reading is a thing of the past for most, and the books that sell well are what I call consumer fiction, often filmic, rich in hooks and cliffhangers (I’m not dissing these, I also consume consumer fiction along with all other kinds of fiction). They’re formulaic, hit all the beats in all the right places and after you’ve read one, you read the next, already forgetting about the previous one (hence “consumer”). There’s no longer any prestige connected to having read your way through any kind of literary canon, or exploring and discussing what it means to be human through fiction.
According to this study the prestige lies with being a WRITER, being able to call yourself an AUTHOR. Having written and published books. One’s name on the page - THIS IS WHAT MATTERS - this is the thing that carries weight today.
This obviously isn’t sustainable. For writers to exist there have to be readers. Readers who read widely, voraciously and with open minds, who want to discuss loudly the books they’ve read, and who are willing to take a punt on the book of a lesser-known author making an appearance in an independent bookshop, and which will allow these authors to move on to become more established AND leave their seats in the independent bookshops still warm for the next set of emerging authors, i.e. the very hopeful and largely non-commercially focused creative writing students who had come to mine my experience.
At the end of the evening in that bookshop then, I wanted to take each one of these students aside to ask them one question. A question that didn’t have anything to do with the lack of book sales that evening, but much more to do with my burning interest in finding out how they see their own future as writers in the current ecosystem. I wanted to ask them, Who do you think will buy your book, if you don’t?
To put my money where my mouth is, and it was hardly a chore, because I’ve been meaning to get these anyway, I’ve ordered:
Moon by
, published byOnce I’ve read these, I shall turn to this community for more.
In other writing news:
My Substack read of the week was Doctor Who’s stone circle and the Whispering Knights by
because we seem to be on the same wavelength in terms of ancient landscapes and the way they allow us to connect with prehistory.
Remember the request for full my agent and I had of The Legend of Maderwerth last week? Well, the response was a thank you, but no thank you. This is fine, it means that it wasn’t for them.
Received a rejection for short story number seven from Paris Review, no less.
Tweaked and re-submitted short story number seven to Death Kit, but it could well be that number seven is unplaceable as it explores the intersection of how a highly stereotypical British person see themselves compared to how they behave, in terms of xenophobia, i.e. the subconscious residues of post-colonialism - it’s based on 33 years worth of observations and gathering of odd comments I’ve received as a foreigner, and it’s sensitive.
Received a rejection for short story number two, and I don’t understand. This is a good story, the best one even!
So I moved straight on to re-submitting short story number two to Grain Magazine.
Finished short story number eleven, and I think I like it, a lot.
Started short story number twelve, I’m now thinking that it would be nice to finish twenty short stories in total before September, because that would mean I’ve written twenty short stories in a year, which is more than I’d written before in total. But twelve is already amazing.
Did a couple of hours novel research-note-typing, world-building, workings-out.
Currently reading through the literary translation I’ve been working on since January, because it’s got to go now.
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My novel The Shape of Guilt is available to buy with free delivery from Blackwell’s in the UK or from Barnes & Noble in the States, and if you’re a Swedish speaker you can find out more about where to buy my Swedish children’s books here. Or you can leave a review of The Shape of Guilt here. And finally, here’s a tip jar:
A great post, Lisa. And really interesting, too. Thank you for sharing your experiences both as reader and author so openly and honestly.
Thanks for recommending my standing stones! There really is something to be said about these relics and the connection to the past they bring.
I know exactly what you mean about people wanting to have a book with their name on it and not reading anyone else. About ten years ago, I remember an author I know saying something similar. I think they'd just been doing a workshop for writers and when she asked people what they were reading, almost all of them said they don't have time because they're writing. I find that extraordinary - I find time to read, even if I'm writing. How boring would a piece of writing be if it's by someone who hasn't read a book in years?
I hate to mention the dreaded AI, but it's something that taps into the urge some people have to get their name on a book cover. They'd crank out a book using AI, not even writing it, and then go, "look, I've got my name on it, I'm a writer too!" Except they're not, they're a prompter at best and a thief at worst.
I do wonder if the way Amazon has made self-publishing so easy has contributed to the shift. I know lots of writers who've worked really hard on books they can't get published, and they've turned to self-publishing. I don't have any problem with that (in fact, I self-published a novella in the 90s by photocopying it like a fanzine!). But unfortunately there's a lot of other people who bash out a novel, do no more than check it for spelling mistakes, and stick it on Amazon with a crappy MSPaint cover (these days of course there's crappy AI covers which rip off other people's, of course). Then they tell everyone they're an author because a book exists with their name on it. Well done for doing the first draft, but really, there's more to writing a book than that!