The Reader on the Street

Sometimes I forget exactly how saturated I am in the publishing industry, at how familiar all the jargon and the genres and the buzz is to me, while the people outside this world, the ones buying the books, are lucky if they can name ten books publshed this year that don’t have the words “Harry Potter” in the title. Even the readers one comes across on the internet are better educated about the industry than most — the internet readers are the ones likely to visit an author’s webpage and know something about the style of books published by different publishing houses. (My mother, for instance, probably reads a dozen books a month, and would be hard pressed to name a single publisher).

But the average reader, the reader on the street, now there’s a person whose mindset I’ve had a tough time accessing since i entered this business. I just can’t think like them anymore, and I have a difficult time trying.

These are the people who toss about the phrase “Harlequin romance” as a generic, like Q-Tip or Kleenex. (That sound you hear is Harlequin cheering).

These people are the ones at parties who tell you they “would never read a romance,” only to later admit that Nora Roberts is their favorite author. Turns out that they thought all romances have a cover featuring Fabio clutching to his chest a half-naked bimbo in a bodice.

These people are the ones who would probably really like Silhouette Bombshell, if they ever bothered looking for action adventure novels on the category romance racks (which they wouldn’t, cf. bitch in bodice).

These are the people who think Paris Hilton really wrote that book.

These are the people who think all authors are as rich as JK Rowling, who think all books get made into movies, and would start looking through you and blinking if you attempted to explain the difference between various subgenres.

These are the people (and I swear I’ve actually had this experience) who think “fiction” means fantastical elements — talking dogs, time travel, aliens, fairies, monsters — and “non-fiction” means Maeve Binchy and Richard Russo. And don’t try explaining novels to them, either, they’ll just insist that their precious “non fiction novels” really did happen to all the people who wrote them. In which case, I really gotta meet Carl Hiassen.

These are the people who haven’t a clue about motif, or POV, or head-hopping (one reader asked me the other day if “third person point of view is one of those books where three different people use ‘I’ — because I hate that”) or dialogue tags, or any of the other craft issues I obsess over daily.

These are the people who will be deciding whether or not I get paid next summer. Makes me look at marketing in a whole different light. Everything I know about the industry, everything I learned to get in and market my book to publishers isn’t going to matter at all to them. They won’t care if it’s a mixture of romance and suspense and collegiate fiction and chick lit and whatever genre-bending buzzword they want to stick on after that. I’ll be lucky if I can nail down what I mean by “fiction”.

Of course, it’s not like it’s easy to understand this industry even if you’ve been in it for a while. Take my publisher, Bantam Dell. Bantam Dell is a division of Random House that publishers adult fiction and non-fiction (as Shauna Summers said in Reno, everything from Stephen Hawking to Danielle Steele). It’s made up of Bantam Books and Dell Publishing. Under this umbrella is also the Dial Press, which I think publishines more literary works, and Spectra, which does the sf and fantasy stuff. If you are published by this company, then the little publisher insignia on the side of your books can say all sorts of stuff, depending on imprint and publishing format, including: Bantam, Dell, Delta, Delacorte, etc. etc. I think I’ve figured out a code, but I could be totally wrong. Bantam books say Bantam in hardcover, trade and mass market. Dell books say Dell in mass market, Delta in trade (sometimes!!!) and Delacorte in hardcover. Diana Gabaldon’s hardcovers say “Delacorte.” So will mine. Luanne Rice’s say Bantam. Okay, so far so good.

However, once upon a time in the Kingdom of Bertelsmann (whether before or after Dell joined with Bantam or became part of RH has since been lost to the annals of history, or at least to this author’s Googleability), the Baronet Dell sold/transferred/gave/ransomed/indentured/whatever to King Random House a children’s imprint called “Delacorte Press Books for Young Readers,” which is now a lovely lordling of Random House Children’s. So thus it is that there are two Delacorte Presses at Random House: Bantam Dell Delacorte hardcovers for adults, and Random House Children’s Delacorte Press for Young Readers.

But does the average person on the street know this? Would they care even if they did? Heck, I can hardly understand it, and I’m writing for these folks! So I’m thinking not so much. I just write a really good story and people pay for it and enjoy it and Random House makes money and gives some of it to me and everyone’s happy.

Right?