Highbrow and Lowbrow: Why Book Categories Don't Serve Avid Readers

For too long, publishing professionals, ourselves included, have been chasing the largest possible audiences. But in this episode we tried to take our experience and apply some finer lenses to focus on the far-more diverse independent market. 

We dug into some new research about book readers and their preferences, and discussed the common biases of highbrow and lowbrow book culture. While not immediately obvious, this distinction may offer more helpful way to understand why fiction is dominated by genres, and also why it's such a struggle to find books and book communities that transcend those familiar marketing categories. 

Links to the readings mentioned: 

"The Omnivore Dilemma," by Laura B. McGrath: substack.com/home/post/p-176741258

"The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem," by Tajja Isen: TheWalrus.ca/the-publishing-industry-has-a-gambling-problem/

"Freedom Without Belonging: The American Spiritual Predicament," by David Morris: dvdmorris.substack.com/p/freedom-without-belonging-the-american

Publishing Disrupted is at PublishingDisrupted.substack.com

Mick Silva is at MickSilvaEditing.substack.com

David Morris is at dvdmorris.substack.com, LakeDriveBooks.com, and Hyponymous.com.

Transcript

Mick 0:00

Hey everybody, this is Publishing Disrupted podcast. And I'm editor Mick Silva.

David 0:07

And publisher and literary agent David Morris.

Mick 0:10

And we're exploring the ways in which book publishing is changing and how writers can best meet that challenge. And thanks for coming back. Two former Christian publishing industry professionals here learning to navigate the massive independent book market. And if that's you or if you're even just interested in that, this is the podcast for you. Many recent changes in the industry that we talk about. And, you know, sometimes we're talking about disruptions that are happening to us, and sometimes we're the disruptors. So we're kind of, you know, equal opportunity here. So yeah. Thanks for being here. been new in your life? We were kind of riffing a little bit before we started. We both feel tired.

David 0:54

I mean, actually. There's so many details in book publishing, honestly. You know, from editing words to putting books together and design and marketing. There's so many details, no matter where you are in it. Um yeah, let's see. I, on the agenting side, hyponymus literary, it's been some exciting things going on. We added Audrey Claire Farley to the team, and then just recently Ivy Zeller to the team. You can learn more about both of them at hyponymus.com. Um just you'll find you'll figure out the spelling. Uh I won't try to spell it right now. Yeah. And then we have one more person to announce soon as well. Cool. Right on. And it's great for me. Four agents. That's yeah, I mean it's not like we have a lot of authors. That's not the point, though. The point is we're it feels really creative. That's the that's the main thing I keep saying about it because these are all very different people, yes, and not your typical literary agent types, but they all have traction and understanding from one perspective or another in publishing. And it gives me the opportunity to um you know coach and and and guide, uh, which is just great because you don't you take it, when you've been in publishing for so long, you take it for granted what you know. And even though I might not be using certain knowledge at some of the time, things come up in this work in particular, where it's like, well, yeah, this is what that is. And I'm like, whoa, I didn't know I knew that. Right, where'd that come from? I haven't used that in a while. So yeah. And so they're learning as they grow. And yeah, you know, I have a very liberal policy about what they might want to do if they ever want to leave. I'm just happy to mentor people for a while. I'm really excited about that. And then over on the Lake Drive side, yeah, we had a we've had Catherine Spearing's book came out. Super excited. Yeah, "A Thousand Tiny Paper Cuts: the subtle insidious nature of spiritual abuse and life on the other side." Yes. That's gotten off to a great start. Um yeah, just doing all the things surrounding getting books out there in this, you know, sort of a subset of of our world. Right. And trying to inhabit that.

Mick 3:21

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then you got your own blog, and you have, I saw something from Becky Garrison recently that you did, maybe an excerpt? Yeah. Uh spiritual narcissism. Yeah. Yeah. So lots of stuff to kind of check out there. I mean if you haven't, yeah.

David 3:39

I've gotten better at video editing.

Mick 3:42

oh good!

David 3:42

I might be a PhD in religious studies, but I can do video editing.

Mick 3:45

That's becoming increasingly necessary in our line of work. Yeah. Short video.

David 3:50

Yeah. I think we're doing some good posts on Lake Drive, and I'm looking forward to even bringing some things from the archive, some of our other cool our other books. Uh we've got all these, we've got all we've got all these video interviews on our YouTube channel. Oh, yeah. And I'm hoping to bring some of that back.

Mick 4:07

Right, yeah. Like Zoom calls that you've done and recorded. Yeah, people were asking if we're ever going to do a video of this. And we've done well, you did the one last week with Rohatty, because that was uh discussion we had, and that was that was fun. But that was on Zoom. Right. But I'm wondering how we would even do it here. Because we're at the library and we've got to do that. We'd have to get a camera. Yeah, like that. We have to get a Go camera or something.

David 4:30

Yeah, maybe. Whatever that's right. But that could that could be fun too. Yeah. And someone has to edit it. But you know, we could we could spare bones. We're not editing this. Yeah, we're just putting it up. Don't expect polished, don't expect don't expect everything's perfect. And it's not a reflection that we don't publish good ideas.

Mick 4:48

Well, and also, yeah, it's just like we sometimes we're riffing and we're coming up with stuff that that, like you said, we haven't talked about for a long time. Right. But I mean, that's knowledge that you've had and you want to share it. And that's like the main reason I'm doing this, I guess, just personally. So there's just a lot of stuff that's left on the table if I'm just coaching or just editing, yeah. Or like for you, just publishing. Right, right. Um, you know, like knowledge that kind of goes deeper. And we'd like to talk about culture. Yeah. And like spiritual abuse and like the effects of this. And and today, like I I sent you an article. Um, well, it's a Substack post. Laura McGrath had a a kind of quick take on some recent research that talks about genre and and avid readers and how they tend to be pretty omnivorous in their reading tastes and what they go toward. But I mean, the question was asked like, how do you find the books that you read? Like, what where are you finding this? And and a lot of the the just sort of anecdotal stuff is always word of mouth. And it still holds true that most of the time people will say it's from a recommendation from a friend. Right. Word of mouth is still hearing about this book so much you just had to go get it, whatever it is. It's usually that you've just heard about it. Um, and that that doesn't negate the importance of, like we were saying, advertising, uh, short video, even to like promote things. I mean, you might hear an author talk about the book and you go, Oh, that sounds good. I want to go get it.

David 6:18

But media influencers.

Mick 6:20

Yeah, I mean, there's so many like myriad ways, and and it's a very important question, obviously, in book publishing, but like even she she drills into the the research a little bit, even as you you drill down on genre and and these groupings of books, what type of readers are we talking about? They tend to fall apart because people read cross-genre. Right. And the research shows the more people read, the more likely they are to read pretty widely. Yeah. And I mean, obviously, if you read a lot of books, it's not going to be all in the same genre. Right. With the exception of hardcore romance readers, it sounded like. At least from this research. Yeah. Right. Um, which I don't know. I mean, they have all kinds of prejudices about people who just stay in one genre, but like, you know, kind of might want to branch out one.

David 7:06

Implicit prejudices. Yeah, yeah.

Mick 7:08

Well, in romance and science fiction fantasy, right? Those are the two that kind of like become isolated. And yet she even points out like we within the research, there's even some broadness to those genres. Right. Right? Because there's like speculative, right? Or there's even romance that's like historical or contemporary.

David 7:26

Right. Frankly, you and I should be reading more romances. Have you read a romance in a long time? I have not. Yeah. Uh I have. It's been a while. I mean, I so I I kind of like to.

Mick 7:37

Did you really? Yeah. For what what job?

David 7:40

Uh just working in religious publishing. Oh, really? Historical romances. Historical, yeah. Um, well, Christian romances. Yep, Christian romances. That's that's usually um everybody gets saved at the end.

Mick 7:53

Everybody gets saved. Nobody takes their clothes off. It's always very kind of chaste, right? People are taking their clothes off elsewhere? Oh my gosh. So this is like I'm gonna get in trouble, but like I mean it's it's girl porn, basically. Like

Genres define what we read

Mick 8:07

there's a lot of like my wife will say that.

David 8:10

Oh, that's her term, not yours.

Mick 8:12

I'm I'm disavowing any any notion of that. But but I mean it's it's very difficult to find, you know, some books that are outside of that kind of like cultural. Right. I I don't know if we can say ghetto, but like like you tend to um stay within your genre if you like a certain type of read. And I I do that too. Right. You know, I I I tend to like the sort of speculative uh genre. Um and sometimes that skews into science fiction fantasy, I suppose, or even thriller. There's this great book, Dark Matter. I think it has a uh it's either on Netflix or Apple or something. A movie, yeah. Yeah, there's like a series on it. But like, you know, it's it's got a speculative premise, but then it it goes into maybe um true crime or thriller or or even romance. I mean when you say speculative premise, definitely speculative premise like a what if, you know. Yeah. Uh what if there were multi-universes and you open a door and you can go to a different universe or something. Um or or meet yourself in another form or something. I mean, there's so many different ways that you could start a book with a premise like that, right? And then it turns into being more of like say genre of history because it's not contemporary, or genre of romance because it's all about him finding his lost love or whatever.

David 9:38

So maybe that's a that's a more overarching category, like speculative premise writing.

Mick 9:44

And it's one of the difficulties we had in publishing.

David 9:46

They could lead you into different genres. Right. Like how do you categorize this? It's a it's a literary technique, yeah. As much as it might be a genre.

Mick 9:54

And so to bring this down to like the publishing level, on the back of the book, typically to categorize this thing, usually people will have either a bicep code or something that that says, you know, this is speculative and romance. Right. So people will find it in both categories.

David 10:11

Presumably wherever they actually use categories.

Mick 10:14

Sure, yeah, depending on the bookstore and the the owner. Um but even at at Amazon, you know, you see it in different categories when you look up the book. And and sometimes that's helpful. And according to this article um Laura was mentioning, um, and we should put the notes in the or the the link in the notes. Yep, yep. Um, it's it's gonna be difficult to find the book outside of you know one genre or one category. So she's questioning like how how helpful ultimately are these categorizations.

David 10:50

Um yeah. And ultimately saying we overthink them sometimes. And w e overthink the readers that belong to them as publishers. I think they're just hanging out in the one category. Right. Um, but they're not. There's truth to it, yeah. Especially for some genres particularly . Yeah. I know for me, I got really fascinated with Austria in recent years. Um, for why I won't go into , but I was reading an academic history of Austria.

Mick 11:24

Okay.

David 11:25

Almost academic anyway. Then I read more of a popular biography of their their last key emperor, right, who died in the early 1900s. Um, and I read a novel that my wife found at one of those um neighborhood libraries.

Mick 11:42

A translated Austrian novel?

David 11:44

No, it was actually written by an English professor here in the States um just about uh Ceci, um the Empress Elizabeth, who was married to this emperor, and her cousin Ludwig II, who built Neuschwin, I'm never I can never say it right, and I study German, Neuschwanstein in in outside of Munich. Oh, cool. You know, the the Disney castle, the Disney castle. That was actually built in the 1800s, but it's meant to look very famous looking one. And he died an early death, very mysterious early death, and they were cousins. So that was a that was sort of a what if premise, what would the relationship look like? Yeah, and that was kind of fun. So that one interest led me into those different genres.

Mick 12:30

Right. Like and we all probably have some of those. For one reason or another. We just have weird interests and then we go and look for books about them, you know.

David 12:39

Yeah, and that's the fun thing is to have I mean, the weirder, the more interesting. I mean, the more weird interests you have, probably the better off you are. You know, just go find some. And maybe that's what drives people more than anything else.

Mick 12:51

Honestly, I yes. We were talking about literary culture uh a couple episodes ago and you know how difficult it is to define. I mean, it was based on that Walrus article, which I'm forgetting the name of now, but yeah, we'll put that in the notes too. We wanted to talk about like how that that has to do with like the differences between the Christian market and the general book market as well.

David 13:19

Was it in that article that the one that you were circulating just now, the graph article about highbrow and lowbrow? Is that where they talked about that? And then middle brow . Yeah, that I thought was really I think that's actually really good language. Yeah. Um, because there is a sort of educated elite highbrowness to a lot of broad market publishing. And then there's-- the lowbrow would be more like the genre romance fiction, right? No offense intended. And uh well, that's just how they're grouped, yeah. Yeah, and then middle brow, what would that be? Like um, like some of the self--there's a lot of self-help going on right now. Sort of business self-help type books.

Mick 14:02

It's-- it may be research driven, but it's to a popular audience, or somebody like this. Yep. Um Oliver Sachs gets put in that group sometimes because he's scientific, but he's also going for a popular audience.

David 14:15

So right now I'm reading a book, I'm not gonna remember the author's name. It's called Self-Made. It's about how we've created images from um, she's a PhD in theology too, from Oxford or Cambridge. But um uh Terram Terram I'm gonna forget her name. But that feels, you know, that's going from like the Enlightenment era where people where she's tracking and anecdotally writing about historical figures who have uh artists in particular who've learned to paint themselves and to present their own image. Yeah. All the way to the Kardashians and today with with social media and what that all means about performance and right and self versus other self versus the divine. Um but that's very that's that's very high brow. Reading that book, it's like I don't even know if I can hang hang in there with this person. Well, and it's very educated, clearly very pulling out some things that she spent a lot of time on, no doubt. Yeah. But um super um conceptual kind of discussion, right? Yeah, and philosophical. A lot of historical references that might seem common to some, but okay. For most people, no.

Mick 15:34

Yes. And and right, it's gonna be difficult uh for a lot of people to relate to, maybe. So that that would be in it. Uh like what category of of bookshelf would that be?

David 15:46

Yeah, right. That's a great question. That's a that's definitely a feels like a genre-defining book. Yeah. Yeah.

Mick 15:53

Yeah. Maybe it's uh uh culture, sociology. Um and it's difficult. Well, um philosophy can be a pretty broad category as well, because there's I mean everything from highbrow to lowbrow. Right. Right. And uh highbrow uh uh assumedly is a little more dense and difficult to read and is gonna be a bit longer. Right. You're gonna be reading 600 pages, but it could be philosophy of economics or money, it could be philosophy of you know anything. Right. So it's a very broad category, but because it it's talking about the ideas, right? Thinking about the way we we think,

Highbrow vs. Lowbrow

Mick 16:35

yeah, or uh the way we categorize these things is going to be in that philosophy section. So that's gonna be a difficult uh one to categorize anyway.

David 16:43

Definitely working in the jobs we've had, there's a highbrow-lowbrow thing going on with like general New York broad market publisher publishing being highbrow. Yes. And what we discovered in what what what came to fruition in the United States is this massive evangelical Christian publishing comp uh movement, the evangelical Christian industrial complex. Yeah. Where when you combine all of the evangelical publishers and their their annual revenue compared to the combined of Catholic, Jewish, body, mind, spirit, eastern religion, however, however, whatever categories you want to do. You can combine all the other spiritual stuff, and it doesn't even come close to the money involved. But that's and and I remember uh we used to throw around this phrase about called heartland publishing. You have the coastal elites, the highbrow coastal elites, you know, putting a lot of stereotypes together, and the and the um flyover states with their you know their their lowbrow religious culture, right? And the books that come and the book publishing that goes along with that. And they're they're very they're two they're they're both very complex and marketplace structures that um even though they're all about book publishing, they're not the same thing.

Mick 18:13

Right.

David 18:14

Yeah. And and that and it was funny because the New York houses were all like buying these publishers who are in Heartland because they're seeing all the money involved.

Mick 18:23

Yeah, there's a lot of money there.

David 18:25

Um and it was always a tension between, you know, from in terms of leadership, in terms of hanging out with the big the big time, the big folks at uh, you know, in the in the penthouse offices in New York City. No, you're you're just describing my entire you're the person from the ghetto showing up. That's right. I actually heard someone from New York publishing Christian publishing the ghetto.

Mick 18:46

Yeah.

David 18:46

Yeah. No, there's even though it's just as big in many ways as well.

Mick 18:49

Well, and this is why the CBA began, right? In the 50s, at least the story the way I was told it when I was coming up in about 99, 2000, somewhere around there, some of my mentors were telling me, I mean, the the origination of the Christian book selling industry came because they were being pushed out or or relegated to the back shelves in a lot of these bookstores. There was no internet, there was no other way to get your books, you went to the bookstore. Right. And in those bookstores, there was no representation of Christian books. So they started this small, you know, outfit of Christian bookstores that were going to basically exclusively.

David 19:31

Was it no representation of Christian books or was it no representation of conservative evangelical Christian books?

Mick 19:38

So uh yeah, the of course, yeah, they're talking about evangelical Christian. Yeah, yeah. Sort of like the universal system that popped up.

David 19:45

Right. Yeah.

Mick 19:46

Yeah. And and right, we've read uh Daniel Vaca's book, uh Evangelical Industrial Complex. Basically, it's it's about like identifying that what is called Christian in this country often means evangelical, yeah, yeah. Often means fundamentalist, yeah. Uh and and and exclusive, basically. And so it started with this idea that we're going to you know have fair play for Christian books. And then it quickly became something that was even um maybe not as big as the general market, but certainly very valuable. And so a lot of the general market publishers saw that around 80s, 90s, even 2000s, and started buying up the Christian books.

David 20:30

And I think what's interesting, we both have had experience with authors, particularly those in the evangelical conservative who want to be in the New York space. And it's always a little bit mind-bending when that goes on. I think they're doing it for legitimacy. There's a lot of reasons. Credibility. It's part of the legitimizing, sort of spreading the gospel narrative, the greatest commandment. Yeah. Well, actually, no, the what is it called? The uh Great Commission. Yeah, which is not the Greatest Commandment, folks. It's the Great Commission.

Mick 21:06

It's something which I always tell people, like when I was first starting out, we were talking about crossover books and how that was something of a mission that they had to take the Christian idea. I never really happened. Put it into general market. Like I would just say, don't do that. That's just not, that's not a good idea.

David 21:23

It it creates the facade or the illusion that it's working, but it's still the same audience, by and large, that's buying that particular book. Like Tim Keller published with Penguin, but it was still Christians buying it. And he probably would have had more success if he was with a with a good Christian publisher. Right. Probably because they actually have the sales teams that know where the Christian bookstores live.

Mick 21:44

Yeah.

David 21:45

And Penguin might have had a semblance of understanding that stuff, but they didn't understand it as innately as the army of salespeople in Christian publishing and the marketing people in Christian publishing.

Mick 21:57

Well, and arguably Keller was helping them more than they were helping Tim Keller, right? Because he's kind of like showing them here's what the audience is, where they hang out, how to reach them. Um, yeah, I think that's probably and eventually they form they they made Waterbrook.

David 22:14

That was that was uh Waterbrook, at Penguin, but at the time now it's Penguin, right?

Mick 22:18

They said, Let's make our own Christian publishing house. And that's how Waterbrook came about. Yep, yep.

David 22:20

I think one thing in terms of getting back to this genre discussion and um literary culture discussion, yeah, is I we've both worked with authors who they want to do a non-fiction book, and then you ask them, well, what do you want to write for your next book? And I I've seen this happen a number of times. Well, I think I want to try fiction next. And usually as a publisher, I'm like, well, you know, that's that's a different genre. There I have uh some direct experience with a very major author in the evangelical nonfiction book space, tried to write fiction. Yeah. And it did not go well, right. Um, at least defined by the fact that everybody, including the agent and the publisher and the author, expected that author to get a giant advance commensurate with the nonfiction.

Mick 23:11

Right.

David 23:11

Yeah, no. And it it just it didn't work financially, it was a disaster. And I mean the best conclusion I was ever able to come up with was just it's different, it was different audiences. So here we go back to like their different audiences. There's not as much crossover uh between the readers, weren't necessarily jumping over into fiction, even though he's kind of writing about some of the same similar ideas, things.

Mick 23:38

Right. Yeah, that's that's a good point. I would say too, I've seen at work where a non-fiction author gets approached by a fiction author, maybe, and then they write it together. They write a novel together. That happens a lot.

David 23:52

Yep.

Mick 23:53

Um, and that's more of a money prospect, I would argue. And then it isn't necessarily that the nonfiction author wanted to write fiction. Right. Or maybe they had. They had wanted to. Uh but they were gonna need some help with doing that.

David 24:04

And so they find a fiction author understands fiction better than the nonfiction author does typically.

Mick 24:09

And it's a prospect to the publishing house to go, oh, well, we can use the name recognition

Fiction is not Nonfiction

Mick 24:14

of the nonfiction author.

David 24:16

But why wouldn't a grassroots author do a nonfiction book and then do a fiction book? What how would you interpret that?

Mick 24:25

How do you mean ? Write a fiction book themselves after having written nonfiction?

David 24:30

Yeah.

Mick 24:30

I just I think that there's there's probably some prejudice involved there. Right? Some bias in terms of what that that nonfiction author is capable of of doing. Because if you start as a non as a non-fiction author, that's a that's uh I mean fiction and nonfiction are are so far apart from each other. It it's uh i except where maybe you were a memoirist, and I would say that's different. Um if you're writing stories to begin with, it's not quite as much of a jump to start writing fiction. And we've seen that happen with a lot of people over over the years, and even there's modern versions. Um Matt Haig is one uh that comes to mind. But like if if you're writing um if you're writing true nonfiction that's a sort of research driven, maybe it's uh journalistic form, you know, it's investigative or something and it's and it's informed in that way. That that has a storytelling aspect to it, but it's not a thr uh story from beginning to end. And and that's a much different beast to try to rankle.

David 25:37

No, no, but now you're talking about it in the sense of do you have the skill, transferable from nonfiction to fiction? So that's one thing.

Mick 25:46

I think the bias is there against that in publishing.

David 25:53

Oh, that you can make that leap from nonfiction to writing fiction. Right, I would agree.

Mick 25:54

And and I don't know that it's untrue. I think in many cases it probably is true. Yeah. Um but I think that bias exists, and that's probably one of the major reasons that doesn't work.

David 26:08

Yeah, I agree with that. I feel like there are examples, they're very rare examples where fiction works to a nonfiction audience. I'm thinking of Ian Morgan Cron's book I always come back to that one.

Mick 26:22

Oh, uh is it Chasing Francis?

David 26:25

Yeah, that book, and then like The Shack is a fiction, is a novel that I think appealed to a lot of.

Mick 26:31

See, I would argue though, those aren't true novels. They're sort of, I mean, what are they? They're dressed up as a novel, as a story. I mean, this is pejorative, but like an allegory. It's meant to be nonfiction, it's meant to be teaching fiction, shall we say, maybe that's a way to say it. Because there's teaching memoirs as well. Yeah. Right? It's not really about the story, it's really about what the takeaway is.

David 26:55

But where my head goes to with that wanting to cross over, it's just it's not just sort of your audience, but it's also your ability to promote the fiction. Yeah. Okay. Which is a totally different game to begin with. Sure. But if you're out there promoting your nonfiction with a with a certain certain message, an argument, a topic, you're gonna be in front of certain audiences, whether it's online or in person. Yes. And that doesn't and and getting into like let's say you even want to write into a a certain genre, that's just gonna be very different.

Mick 27:31

Yep.

David 27:31

Um now it all might be fine if you've got a hundred thousand Instagram followers. Who cares? Do it. But no, right. But uh, and that actually is great. Yeah. Um, but I think that's yeah, I mean I yeah.

Mick 27:44

I think that in in some fiction though, let's say it's Tom Clancy or someone like this who's writing pretty detailed stuff, like the uh the the selling the the sale prospect, I guess, to uh as a nonfiction uh writer is going to be your your experience or your your expertise. Expertise. You're you're standing upon this uh you know bio that you have that says you're an expert in this topic and that's why you have this book and that's why people read it. For for a fiction author, I think that only works if, like I said, you're you're sort of standing upon your knowledge or your expertise about you know military warships or the history of Scotland, or you know, it's like there's there's some sort of expertise that you're putting into your fiction that people are going there for. It's not necessarily for the story.

David 28:38

Yeah.

Mick 28:38

This is this is interesting because I do think there's a we talked about highbrow and lowbrow. There's there's even that comes into play here as well. I think in some publishing circles I've been in, and maybe it's more true in general market even than than Christian, where you're giving uh as a publisher more clout and respect to the nonfiction author who's an expert than the fiction author who's an expert in their field because fiction is a story and you a dime a dozen and you could find anyone to write that. Right. It seems as though there's a little bit of a if you write fiction, it becomes automatically this sort of money grab or even just popularity grab that then immediately um signifies lowbrow to a lot of the publishers. And I think that's part of the bias that we're talking about.

David 29:28

I I struggle with understanding marketing fiction. Um I'm I obviously I'm I I probably know more about it than I realize, but um I I'm you know I'm so ensconced in marketing nonfiction. Nonfiction. And that's so much driven by um the authority, the the expertise.

Mick 29:47

You sell the person as much as the book.

David 29:49

The person right. Whereas fiction is the the author name becomes less a component of it almost doesn't matter to some extent. As to buying the book. It's more the genre, more the topic, until the setting.

Mick 30:04

They have enough novels, the author's name doesn't even matter. Right. Yeah.

David 30:08

Right. So like a best-selling novel by a debut author is a very rare thing. Right. Perhaps even more rare, because there's not much you can do as the author about that. You know, because unless you really do have a big falling for one reason or another. Sure. Um so that's more based on a book getting really solid sales distribution, a publisher. That's all that's kind of going back to the old idea of publishing. The publisher actually really sells it. Yeah. The publisher can help you get publicity. Yeah. In and and I think that's something that maybe that's more pure about the fiction market space is that you could be you've got, you know, you really are trying to go out there and stump for a book, whether you're a publisher or an author, and let it sell on its own merits, as opposed to what's the author's stature in the culture or what's their following or what have you. Um but I think it's also more tricky and less guaranteed.

Mick 31:04

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And that's why I think uh that's not even a counterpoint to what you're saying. It's it's more of an addition. It's like the debut novel is is often your best shot at making anybody recognize who you are as an as a fiction author. I mean, that that's in that system card. In that system. If your debut doesn't do well, you're not gonna have another book.

David 31:28

Yeah. Conversely, there are the authors who are more independent and they're not really signing with publishers, they're even self-publishing, and they're putting out a lot of, they're putting out more books, and they're using their they're using their own books as a way to build their platform. Yeah. And it's just it's multiple books over time. That is the secret. Sure. Which isn't that different from a lot of other publishing, to be honest, but it might be happening faster. Of course, people worry that they're writing it with AI, and that's of course yeah, that's a valid concern. But um, it's usually it's usually just a part of it.

Mick 32:00

Yeah, and and novels being written by AI, I think we're we're still pretty far off from that. I could see nonfiction where that's much more where it's a viable option where people likely.

David 32:10

Yeah, people are doing it, but you can tell when you s when you start reading it. Yeah.

Mick 32:14

You can tell. And and I would say like fiction rests upon its style and less upon its function. Um you know, there's a voice that you're trying to to evoke in it in all fiction, and if it doesn't work on that level, it's not gonna work. So trying to write that through AI, I think that's always gonna be a challenge. Yeah, yeah. Um, it's still just limited. And and maybe it won't be forever. I mean, obviously it's growing all the time. So an AI written novel, um, we're probably within our lifetime gonna read something like that. But that's whether we know it or not. I know, right? Hopefully we get uh government that'll allow us to know that kind of thing and make sure that copyright still matters and all of this, but so far that's not looking good.

David 33:02

I think I think the thing, like if I had if I had the one thing to say to authors about this is just try to be aware that there are different literary cultures out there. Yeah, whether they're lowbrow or they're highbrow. Yeah.

Mick 33:13

Um middle brow, whatever that is.

David 33:16

And and I think when when you're first trying to understand publishing, you've got a book manuscript you want to get out there, you think you just think naturally, well, people in general are gonna want to read this.

Understand the business

David 33:28

Yeah. Yeah. But to think to think like a business person about your creative work, which every creative person should have a most most creative people who are successful start things like that. Start to develop a business understanding of their creative work, um, then you then it's important to start learning about these different literary cultures. Yes. Um that's always gonna be an issue. And I think even some people in publishing don't see those different cultures. Absolutely. Yeah, they assume things are gonna work. To their detriment. Like we like in that article, that Walrus article, uh, the book Heretic was in there. Right. And uh the author um has I've heard her mention this before that that there was some issues with her publisher going through a big change where she didn't get as much promotion as she might have otherwise had. But I I look at that book and I go, well, I think it's just really risky. Yeah. This particular book was trying to appeal, trying to talk about disenfranchisement in the religious world from a memoir point of view. Right. And the author has credentials, writing credentials, more for the um higherbrow coastal broad market publishers, general market, but was writing about a background that was with a different literary culture. Yes. And I think that's I think that's tricky. I think that's tricky. Christian culture, that's right. Yeah, to to assume that the highbrow culture is going to be interested in this in this topic that's mostly contained by a different literary culture. Right. And lyric culture meaning publishers, types, publicists, marketers, read, influencers. That's right.

Mick 35:09

If you're not in so um, yeah, there was a there was a miscommunication there or misunderstanding of the remote.

David 35:14

Yeah, I mean, I mean that that article actually mentioned the size of the person's advance, I think. Yeah. And and I it was it was a like significant. It was a big advance. And which is what m broad market publishers seem to do with, you know, and and I you know, I've done that myself, paid way too much for something. And realized later, you know, I never would pay that much again for that book.

Mick 35:35

Well, you have to win against the other publishers that are bidding sometimes.

David 35:38

Yeah, and it's just hard in the amount of time you have to understand what you're working with, and you get excited about something. Um or other people around you get excited about it.

Mick 35:45

Yeah. Yeah. Um sometimes you have money to spend and you know it's gonna be a write-off, and you're toward the end of the year and you're like, well, we want to win this.

David 35:53

But I think it's I think as publishing professionals and as authors, discerning what literary cultures you're working with is so key, right? To you know, um just satisfaction and success and meaning and understanding your expectations, which is one of the big things.

Mick 36:11

Well, and like the article, the name of the article in my memory, the uh that publishing has a gambling problem. Big publishing has a gambling problem. Some of the Taja Is Ison? Yeah, right? Uh yeah. Um Yeah, basically just showing that you know you can if if you're aware of lowbrow, highbrow, middle brow, you can at least avoid some of the gambling problem that you're gonna run into. I mean typically what what you're seeing is all of these huge advanced books don't earn out. And and then you're left with an author who can't get another book. Right. And I've I've told so many authors this before, uh, you know, kind of behind the agent's back, this is not gonna do me any favors, but I'm gonna share it anyway. Yeah. Like do not take a giant advance on your first book. Right. Like, like just argue it down. Because honestly, you if you don't make that money back, you're not getting a second book.

David 37:04

Right. And and the and the best definition of success for an author is whether or not their book actually earns royalties in the big picture, not what the advance is. Exactly.

Mick 37:14

And and that's over the first year. Typically, if that book cannot earn out what was paid on it for the first year, that's the longest it's going to be given. And sometimes it's less than that. Six months is often how much they're gonna be looking at. You're not getting another book or another book deal, excuse me. Um so so yeah, just to be aware of the the economics of that, but also the like you said, the the literary culture that you're appealing to. Yeah. I do think lowbrow highbrow is probably most useful. Yeah. If you can think in terms of that.

David 37:45

Um without judgment. No, right. Yeah. I really either way. I mean, we're both eyebrow could be pretty judgy about eyebrow, that's for sure.

Mick 37:54

I've I've been a judger of eyebrow for sure. Yeah. Um, but then highbrow judges lowbrow, of course. And we know this. So condescending goes down to lowbrow. Yeah. We're trying to sort of bridge those those uh gaps, I guess, in some ways. Maybe we're both middle brow and we don't realize it. We should we should understand what middle brow is. Maybe we need another episode.

David 38:14

Yeah. Or maybe they're just you know definitions of part realities and temptations rather than the whole person who might live within any one of those. Well, right.

Mick 38:25

And yeah, that's where I wanted to get into. So we do need another episode because I want to talk about your other article uh where you're talking about, you know, how we group things and like community, where where are we going? I mean, because we want to talk in terms of like the spiritual audience or a spiritually interested audience. Right. And how do we create culture? Yeah, right, a literary culture around sort of deconstruction and spiritual diversity, let's say. Right. For lack of a better term.

David 38:57

Yeah, so a literary culture around this culture. Right.

Mick 39:00

Yeah. And I think your takeaway in that article or that you wrote uh on your blog, the most recent blog post, I'm gonna put that as our third link here. So people need to check it out. Yeah. But your your takeaway, at least for me, was that community is difficult, but it we need to be extending respect for other people's points of view. Right. And if we can just have a bigger table, right, we can have a wider conversation. And maybe maybe the community, the elusive community we feel like we're always chasing.

David 39:27

Right.

Mick 39:27

Yeah, right. I think you used the term uh religious universalism. Uh-huh. And I was like, well, yeah, that sounds really good.

David 39:34

Which doesn't mean everybody believes the same thing, it means everybody respects each other's and and embraces and even explores the differences while maintaining their own tradition as well. Right. And it all mixes together, yeah, but there's still always going to be differences.

Mick 39:48

Yes. Yeah. Holding on to the one while reaching out for the other, right? It's it's a both hand kind of situation. And and to me that's that's what the um takeaway, like belonging, community, right? All these connections, all these watchwords that we have, that's where that's found. Yeah. Is in respect for other people's points of view. And if you can't do that at a very basic level, I don't know. I mean, most avid readers that I know are able to do that. Yeah. They can read highbrow, they can read lowbrow. Yeah. They're not judging it necessarily. They're just getting what they can from it.

David 40:25

To me, it also brings up the phrase imagined community. Um the community doesn't have to be you actually hanging around with people. It could be imagined community. Like we all we all kind of, these are our the ideals we aspire to, but we're kind of impoverished in both. Or we're impoverished in one, we have too much of the other. Yeah. Um, we don't have enough imagined community, universal imagined community. Right. And we have our sub-communities that we don't want to give up.

Mick 40:53

And and you're right. I mean, this is getting into what we could explore next time. But like uh, you know, typically we're trying to hold on to what we don't want more because we're really clear about that. Yeah. Uh than we are. I'm trying to uh like envision or even innovate in what we do want in terms of community and culture.

David 41:13

To be continued.

Mick 41:14

Yeah, this is great. This is great. Okay. Thanks for being here, everybody. Uh we'll we'll see you next time. Thank you.