Fifty Shades of Landfill · 6:01am Mar 24th, 2016
A follow-up to my post Fifty Shades of Marketing, in which I explained how Fifty Shades of Gray was marketed through the roof after publishers misinterpreted "2 million hits"--which translated to about 10,000 readers (2 million hits, divided by {2 hits per chapter, times 2 to account for re-reads and page refreshes, times 75 chapters when that count was made} = 6666 readers)--as "millions of readers".
So the next question was: Did people want or like the book they were hyped into buying? Was this a street-smart publisher tapping an unsuspected pent-up demand for badly-written BDSM? Or was it, as cynics said*, just proof that marketers, not people, decide what they'll buy next?
Answer: Just proof that marketers decide what people will buy.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported today that thrift stores are getting so many unwanted copies of the Fifty Shades books that an Oxfam shop built a fort out of the books, and tweeted photos of it, to stop the Gray tide rushing in.
* Well, me, anyway.
I wish I had something punny to say about this.
That article popped up on my FB feed a couple hours ago.
Fucking hilarious.
(edit)
In the article I read there was also this bit how 2 million plus copies of this other book was pulped to make roads in I believe Canada.It was the UK, here's the article, it's from 2003
3823906 Thrifty Shades of Gray?
Admit it, that's your living room.
3823917 I call it my "pleasure palace."
3823918
Thanks for not showing us what was behind the wall.
This is so... gratifying.
3823923
Yes, but I for one hope there is a special place in the afterlife for trees who were felled for the sole purpose of having that printed on them. "Seriously, that's why they chopped me down?!?!"
3823921 As I tell my guests, the pleasure is all mine.
This evokes images of some kind of literary MLM scheme in my mind, although I'm not sure how exactly one would work.
Convince ten friends of yours to buy "Fifty Shades" and you get a real book for free?...
I've read quite a lot that the first $2,000 you make after publishing should all be spent on advertising your book, or you won't make a cent more.
3823921
Ha ha! Look at all those stupid people who actually bought a book and read it before deciding it was bad. Buncha saps.
3823918
In living room did Evil Horse
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where James's profane story ran
In numbers measureless to man
At prices close to free.
well, to go out of character and back off on the cynicism, while marketers will definitely try to sell themselves as being able to make anything popular, they most likely have a list of requirements for what they can legitimately turn into a success (which, upon deciding something can add to their success rate, they will find things like hit count and intentionally blow it way out of proportion)
oops, wasn't able to back off on the cynicism as much as I thought
I'm not totally sure this constitutes important evidence. I know this is going to come as a shock to many people here, because I know the type of people a lot of you are, but sometimes people get rid of books after they read them.
It does show at least that the marketers managed to reach total market saturation-- that almost no one who would possibly want to read 50 Shades didn't buy the book already.
3824125
What are they, Nazis or something?
Clearly you must hoard every single book you own, ever, forever.
I learned this from my parents.
Not that we end up with an excessive number of books or anything as a result.
We definitely don't have an entire wall of the living room completely covered with books.
Or a bookshelf in every single bedroom which is packed overfull with books.
Or closets containing shelves two or three rows deep of hardcover books.
That definitely isn't the case.
3824229
Well... I guess that is less expensive than gold or gems. Probably more comfortable to sleep on, too.
3823996 Oh, come on. It's fan-fiction.
(I read the first 2 chapters in the bookstore. It wasn't terribly written, but the bait it laid wasn't for me.)
It's a shame they didn't have a safe word.
3824236
Incidentally the storage spaces under all the beds are only used for keeping bedspreads and nothing else.
3823933 God Damn that was smooth.
Mmm, I'm prepared to quibble with this.
(I'm sure you're all shocked.)
I don't disagree at all with the basic thesis that a strong, well-executed marketing campaign can get people to buy something they otherwise would not have regardless of the quality. I've bought things myself because of this. I imagine just about everyone here has. That's the point of marketing. It's not even always bad, even; I own a number of products that I would say have improved my life in small to medium ways and were worth the money I spent on them that I only became aware of via marketing or advertising.
I've also bought things because of marketing that I think are complete and utter crap. That I don't like at all.
And while marketing can get people to buy crap, what it can't do, I don't think, is get people to keep buying things they don't like.
In the case of Fifty Shades, the sequels to it... actually sold well! Not nearly as well as the initial volume, which was marketed to hell and back, but well enough to justify their continued production. There is, in fact, an actual market for it, because very few people are going to buy Fifty Shades of Grey, read it, decide they did not like it one bit, and then go "I'm going to buy the next one, maybe I'll like that."
(Sometimes in the case of sequential works this can happen, but usually a brand has to establish trust first, and trust is nonexistent in an initial outing.)
It's like... people actually do like Nickelback. And Coldplay. And Linkin Park. Marketing can get people to buy one Nickelback album, or a Best Of. What it can't do, if they're actually bad, is get them to go "I hated this! I'm going to buy their next album for sure." A lot of people are buying this music and getting value for their money, sufficient value that they'll keep buying said music.
This is merely one data point in a well-known trend going on in the publishing industry.
Publishers decide which books will get promoted. Publishers decide which books will get pushed to booksellers. Publishers decide which books will get re-printed, and which books will get pulped. That's one of the reasons so many mid-list professional authors are going indie: to let the readers decide whether their books are worth reading or not, instead of the publishers.
3824271
That's a very good point.
And I actually like Coldplay and Linkin Park.
3823996
Touché.
You fun ruiner.
3824291
Ooh! Crossover idea!
... wait, that's Deliverance.
3824291
See, but this leads to an interesting question itself. If we let the readers decide...
Doesn't this just-as-well describe Fimfiction's Featured Box? Except instead of human marketers with an agenda, it's an algorithm with some well-understood game theory.
What many authors (probably not "all", perhaps not even "most") seem to want is a meritocracy, and understandably so. They want their hard effort to be recognized, and they don't want perceivedly "weaker" authors from stealing "their" spotlight just because they had a huge marketing division, or because they had a barely SFW coverart and a short description that delivered the punchline far better than the actual fic did. And so we have all these reviewers trying to push fairness (given the caveat that all reviewers have their own individual tastes) by pushing readers toward good stories, and warning them about popular-yet-bad stories. And to a select subset of readers, this is very welcome advice and is very influential in shaping their reading habits. But the Featured Box and the NYT Best Sellers List both prove that readers will read what they want to read, especially when it's spoonfed to them. Undeniably it's less "fair" to the hard-working, underappreciated author, but it's simply the reality of things.
3824291
The flip side of this is that publishers do, in fact, provide massively useful services to authors; they aren't just money leeching, gatekeeping middlemen like many people assume they are. Charlie Stross has written a series of very informative essays about publishing from the perspective of himself, a midlist-reliant sci-fi author, which can be found here. They're long and involved, but one of the big takeways was that going indie (by which I'm assuming you mean self-publishing, as opposed to an independent publisher) would halve his output and also, probably, his income, while massively increasing his stress level.
3824320
The featured box has gotten much better recently, but it used to utterly terrify me. There was a long period of time when clicking my fimfiction.net bookmark was accompanied by the thought "I wonder how much pedophilia and rape I'm going to see in the Feature Box today. Oh, look, fics with both at once! Well played, fimfiction. Well played indeed."
3824320
[Note that this isn't my circus and those aren't my monkeys; I'm attempting to summarize what successful professional authors have written on the subject]
The issue isn't so much whether people will buy things when they're placed in front of them, but rather that publishers actively push Book A at people and actively hide Book B from people, for reasons that often have nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the book.
It's becoming increasingly clear that the Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster) aren't concerned with the industry as a whole, but simply what their next quarter's numbers will look like. If they can make $N million by push-marketing dreck with the right author's name on the cover (even if the book was actually written by the "co-author" credited in small print), they will. If they have successful mid-listers who could have used some of that marketing, well, too bad for them.
When these same mid-list authors move to Amazon or some smaller publisher, they seem to universally see their sales (and income) go way, way up, because there isn't someone actively (if not maliciously) sabotaging them through neglect and short-sighted pricing policies.
This isn't "waaah, we're not getting our fair share" but "hey, could you guys in the fancy suits please stop stabbing us in the back? We don't have to shut up and take it anymore; Amazon doesn't pull this shit."
----
As an aside, this bit?
Pro authors spend a shit-ton of time designing their covers and blurbs to do exactly that. They also engage with both their potential readers and their loyal followers to help market their books. They know how the game is played, they've accepted it, and they're playing it for all they're worth. All the stuff decried around here is SOP in the for-profit writing field.
3824291 Out of curiosity how would you change it? I'm not sure how it's set up now, but the bestsellers list used to be based on demand for a book. I'm sure most of this audience is aware of radio host, raconteur, and author Jean Shepherd's hoax on the bestsellers list back in the day, when he had his listening audience go to bookstores and request the book "I Libertine" by Fredrick R. Ewing. It made the list. Thing was, neither one existed. One way, underrated books get shunted to the side, the other way, books that that are undeserved get attention. What do you do?
3824354
They do indeed, but they are no longer the only (or in some cases even the best) way to access those services. This wonderful inter-tubes thingamabob is allowing authors to connect with professional editors, professional layout experts, professional artists, professional cover designers, etc. without going through the big publishing houses. Smaller and electronic-only publishers allow them to reach interested readers more easily, as well.
Yep, that's another point of contention between the Big Names and the mid-listers. If you're one of a big publisher's favored few, you get extra push behind your books. Leaving that publisher would obviously cut your sales, and losing their huge contracts would obviously cut your income. The smaller authors, on the other hand, often come out ahead.
The same goes with the editing and other services. If you're the Chosen One, you get top-notch service from the publisher. If you're a mid-lister, you're often better off with a smaller publisher, or going indie and contracting out those tasks yourself.
3824365
Honestly, that's beyond me. I'm not in the business, and I can't say.
The impression I'm getting from these fine folks, and some others, is that unless you're a big-name famous author, the only winning move is not to play. The best-seller lists, Big Five publishers, and Oprah reading-lists are largely in a different financial and ideological world than the one Amazon, Baen, and the like exist in, so if you're locked out of one, try your luck in the other.
3824320
Fimfiction's featured box does not really let the readers decide. I've ranted about this many times. It uses a poor algorithm--I don't know the algorithm, but several bad features are obvious:
1. Each story has only a narrow window of opportunity in which it can be featured (usually the first hour that it's published).
2. There are only some times in which it is possible for a new story to enter the box (times when a story in the box is the right age to get pushed out). A story whose window of opportunity doesn't overlap a feature-box window of opportunity (which is most of them) can't be featured.
3. Follower count isn't adjusted for.
4. Dislikes seem to be ignored.
5. Users can still like or dislike a story from the title page, without clicking on any of the chapters.
6. Like / dislike isn't a fine enough distinction to be very useful in the first place.
3824320
There is no good solution to the "feature box problem", not in the least because publishers and readers actually have different priorities.
Basically, if you're a content publisher, you always want to be selling stuff. If someone comes to your store, and they see only stale merchandise they already bought, they aren't going to get anything. Thus, you're constantly pushing new things.
However, a reader wants to consume good quality content and not waste their time on garbage.
These two desires are in conflict. When a publisher actually has good content, then presenting that to the public is excellent for both publisher and reader, and you have an optimal solution.
However, if a publisher doesn't have good content, then they have to present something to the public or else not make money - and the public, being shown this thing as if it were good, is likely to spend their time on the content (and thus generate revenue, be it via sales or via ads) even if it is mediocre.
Thus, a really good featured story box is only as functional as the content being provided allows it to be.
The featured story box actually does a pretty good job of presenting high-quality stories that interest a lot of people. An even better featured story box would specifically feature things that a reader would likely be interested in - something like a cross between the featured story box, YouTube's feed, and Amazon's recommendations. But there's only so much content that comes out, and you want to keep things fresh for people. Of course, one alternative is to show older content they'd be interested in that they haven't read yet (and unlike a news site, FIMFiction has a very good mechanic for tracking this).
But if they're trying to show new content, then the featured story box is regularly going to have crap in it, because only so many good writers submit good stories to the site in any given timespan. There are times when the featured story box really is full of good stuff. But how many good writers publish a story in any given week? How many on any given day?
I'd say that most good writers on the site probably publish a story a month at best, and most post even less frequently. That leaves a lot of front page space for other things - space Knighty has to fill.
3824354
The irony is that what solved this problem was lots of people turning off the mature stories filter. The net result of this was fewer reads on mature stories, meaning that they'd get featured less (and struggled in comparison to non-mature stories), as well as the non-mature featured story box gaining more traction and making it easier for non-mature stories to beat mature stories and push into the featured story box.
Once people actually behaved logically (i.e. turning off content they weren't interested in, or no longer clicking on it), it became less of an issue.
3824370 How can Charlie Stross be a midlist sci-fi author? Who would be a "big name" science fiction author? (BTW, he's science fiction, not sci-fi, which has come to mean space opera made-for-TV type stuff.)
3824400
Um, either I was unclear or something, I was comparing Big Names like Charlie Stross to the mid-listers. (And I'm not going to get into the purity arguments of "science fiction" vs "sci-fi" vs SF. The meaning changes depending on which crowd you're talking to.)
3824400 I think this might have been addressed to me, as the one who referred to Charlie as a midlister, and the answer to that is Charlie was midlist for years, and is still reliant on his backlist for much of his income, usually a solid marker of a midlist author. He'd cheerfully admit that as of right now he's no longer "properly" midlist, but neither is he a sales juggernaut. He occupies a weird twilight border a lot of established authors do.
This is in terms of sales, by the by. Stross has a critical and fandom reputation that punches above his actual weight class when it comes to sales. Ben Aaronovitch is in the same boat; the Peter Grant novels overall sales in the anglosphere are too weak to qualify him as a real top-tier urban fantasy writer in terms of sales, but their critical acclaim and his history as a writer before starting them gives him a really solid reputation.
3824357
Pro authors working for big publishers, at least back in the 90s, usually weren't allowed to be involved with the cover design process beyond possibly being allowed to see the cover and yes/no it before the book went out. Things may have changed.
If you look at that link, and look at the covers in the shifting slide show at the top, a lot of them are obviously self-published. Sarah Hoyt's are good, except for Crawling Btwn Heaven+Earth. Dave Freer's are bad, except for Cuttlefish. I think the biggest give-away is the use of fonts without shading or subtle edge effects, too fat, in primary colors (white, red, yellow). Some, like Nocturnal Interlude, I can't say why they scream "indy!" at me.
3824428
They haven't changed as far as I know. Your name has to be "George Martin" before you get input on your cover art beyond "no, I loathe this, I really really loathe this, make something else happen."
3824354
I just now selected type=video and typed "fuck" into the search box in a filesharing network. 9 of the top 10 results were advertised as pedophilia. The other (#2) was "mother and son".
I know that pedophilia isn't that common. Considerably less than 100% of people are pedophiles. I suppose it's popular on eMule because you can't buy it in stores. Probably there's a similar effect on fimfiction--stories on subjects that you can't buy in bookstores will have inflated viewcounts here.
3824448
Ahem, but yes. That's probably one aspect, that the Internet (and websites which take a friendly stance to that content, cough cough) will cause it to show up proportionally much higher than, say, at Barnes and Nobles. Another factor I wonder (can't verify this while at work) is what happens to your experiment if you filter your results to show only novel-length stories. The Internet and digital distribution (Fimfic included) make it very easy to post 5k one-shots. In Slice-of-Life, this is your small character study. In Romance, this is your first kiss. In porn, this is your gonzo. And while it is undeniably possible to write a novel-length story about a relationship with a minor, the overwhelming demand that your search results show may not carry over into novel-length stories, and might instead be, ahem, a bit more carnal and deviant.
3824552 The irony of bringing Nabokov up in this context is that he was a great writer whom almost nobody would have heard of if he hadn't written a novel about an old guy screwing a little girl. If he'd written an equally great novel about anything else, it would probably have been ignored.
3823956 Far better to cut the center out of it and turn Twilight into a book-vault that even the burglers won't touch.
3824125 "...sometimes people get rid of books after they read them...." Heresy! Lies! I think I have nearly every copy of SciFi and Fantasy I've ever bought down to and including "Get Off The Unicorn." (which is what happens when best-selling authors don't proofread their covers.)
3824320 "...See, but this leads to an interesting question itself. If we let the readers decide...." Obviously, you're not a Hugo voter, or you would never utter those dreaded words.
3824400 Larry Correia, Lois McMaster Bujold (my fave), David Drake, Tim Zahn...
3824428 Hence what happened with "Get Off The Unicorn" I believe
3824389
This has been fixed (somewhat) in recent times. At least, the window is much, much larger. Going by my experiences and those of people around me, I'd say it's more like twelve hours, give or take depending on how strong other things being released around it are.
Of course, that depends on gaining traction-- an author with few followers who doesn't make the Popular Stories list by the time they leave the front page is probably going to be out of luck just because no one is going to find it after that.
This also seems to have been fiddled with. The thing is that they aren't weighted very well. These days you're less likely to see a story in the feature box with 200 likes and 200 dislikes, but you'll still see plenty with 200 likes and 50 dislikes. I can't say I personally mind this, since I have a dedicated team of Dislikers that usually shoot me up to 20 or so within the first few hours, but it also means that quality is going to be more iffy.
3824125
True. One of my grandmothers never saw any point in keeping a book once she'd read it, but she would buy them. It always drove me crazy that she was going to spend money on them and then toss them out instead of just going to the library or something. At least she usually bought used. Thus, all this proves is that many people don't think the book is worth keeping, not that they didn't think it was worth reading.
Speaking of libraries and the effects of marketing, this blog post does remind me of an amusing conversation I overheard at a library where a little old lady was berating the staff for carrying filth like Fifty Shades which she had checked out because she'd seen a newspaper article that said it was good and had heard it was popular. So clearly marketing did have some effect on people.
So does this mean the books were read, and then resold, or never read? Because if the books were read, and the readers got tired of........... "enjoying" them, and sold them to a used bookstore, that's not a sign of failure, that's planned obsolescence.
3824690
Do you have any young dogs? Are they happy? Have they had their shots?
3824229
I've built a bookshelf in my kitchen, because all the other rooms were out of wall space.
I wish I had a bookfort.
3824271
Man, seven years ago I would have taken offense to you lumping in Coldplay with Nickelback. It's marvelous how times change, isn't it?