These are probably my favorite kind of books. I don’t hear about them from Oprah, an award announcement or the bestseller’s list. I stumble upon them at the library, a display at the book store, or through a friend and I am transfixed. The books that are soo good you don’t understand why it took so long to discover it, or why it seems no one else has either. They are the books you tell your friends about and suddenly the one or two copies in the library are on hold for months. Ahhh, the power of word of mouth.
But it makes a person wonder what takes it for a book to make it. Close to 1 million books are published around the world every year so its easy to see how books get easily missed each year and easily forgotten after a year. And if a million books are published it really is a precious thing to “make it big.” So the question is, how do they make it? How do you make that break through, how do you get short listed? How do you get noticed & loved?
Well I did some research and it does unfortunately appear that, typical of any mass produced products these days, you have to have the money for marketing and PR and persistence by the author/agent/publisher. And a gimmick. But that was on the surface, the more I looked the more it got so complicated that it gave me a headache and I gave up(see below). I think this is one of my times where I’d rather just “damn the man” and claim it’s impossible. But don’t cave to my simple mind, here’s a link from the Association of Canadian Publishers.
Now that being said, they aren’t always right either. How do I know this? Well, let us take a look at Mary-Ann Kirkby’s I am Hutterite. She took that book to many publishers that are part of the association and they all said no. They all said there was no audience. So she published it herself. She started her own company to market it herself, and now it is a national best seller. She is the winner of the 2007 Saskatchewan Book Award. And now she is being picked up by US publisher Thomas Nelson for a US release of the book. So the question is what did the publisher’s miss? Why didn’t they see its potential?
On a bigger level: JK Rowling and Harry Potter- it is well documented that over a dozen publishers turned her down what became the bestselling children’s series of all time and it has literally turned Ms. Rowling from Rags to Riches.
So yet again, I still don’t really have an answer. But hopefully I am making you think about all the hard work it takes the author, the editors and the publishers to get that book in your hand; that you have even heard of the book. So treasure your finds, and when you do find a treasure share it with the world!
In the meantime, here are some of my favorite discoveries:
Watermark by Vanitha Sankaran
Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson
The Cure for Modern Life by Lisa Tucker
The Almond Picker by Simonetta Agnello Hornby (translated from Italian)
*I want you to know I don't intend on being a lazy blogger. But I've been busy. Maybe one day I'll interview someone who reads manuscripts for living and get the answer to the question and share it with the world (aka you). But in the mean time, just accept my apologizes for being a lazy blogger.
No comments:
Post a Comment