Don't Speak for This Reader!

I avoid writing soapbox blog posts as a rule for several reasons. Despite my online presence, I’m essentially a private person who is uncomfortable with personal revelations. I also think the things that drive me crazy don’t bother most other people, and thus to rant about them is to bore my readers. Also, my prose suffers when I rant. I don’t write clearly and gracefully when I’m driven by emotion.  But despite all these reasons for keeping the soapbox packed away, I’m making an exception today because the most recent claim I read that X knows what readers want was the straw that rent this particular reader’s frame, metaphorically speaking.

According to a 2009 report from the National Endowment of the Arts, 119 million Americans read books, and most of them are reading fiction. RWA says that 29 million of these regularly read romance.  Both readers generally and romance readers specifically are large enough groups that easy generalizations about what readers want or what they like seem specious to me.  The most read book of 2010, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson, according to Publishers Weekly sales figures, sold 1,900,000 copies. Even if people who read library copies and second-hand copies tripled the number of readers, the best-selling book in America last year was read by less than 5 percent of those 119,000,000 readers. I wasn’t among the 5 percent.

Please understand that I’m not slamming Larsson’s book or any of the other 112 books on PW’s list of bestselling hardcover fiction that I didn’t read last year. My point is that anyone basing his/her conclusions about what readers want on that bestseller list clearly cannot speak for me. With one exception, the books I read that made the list were romance and women’s fiction, two of them by Nora Roberts. But even when I restrict the argument to romance fiction, large generalizations are problematic. RWA lists nine subgenres in romance fiction, and in 2009, the most recent year for which numbers were available, 9,089 new romance titles were released. I read a lot of romance fiction, several hundred books a year, but the books I read in 2009 were just a small fraction of those published.

Most of my romance reading falls into three categories—contemporaries, historicals, and Regencies. I would be most hesitant to describe my reading habits as typical or to draw conclusions about romance readers based on my reading habits or the reading habits of my circle of friends. Even within that relatively small circles, there are as many points of reading differences as there are commonalities. By the same token, anyone who bases her/his conclusions about what readers want only on the popularity of paranormal romance or romantic suspense is leaving me out of the equation.

I understand that publishers and marketers, and perhaps authors, need to make generalizations about readers. I’d just like to see those generalizations qualified. Maybe 85 percent of romance readers do want more novels about vampires, shape shifters, and fallen angels (not a real statistic), but the 15 percent that doesn’t adds up to more than 4 million readers. If just a tenth of that minority read a single book without paranormal elements, those readers would propel the book to bestsellerdom.

Just within the past few weeks I’ve been told by various voices that

1.     Readers want hotter romance. (I don’t especially. I’m more concerned with the power of the story and my engagement with the characters than the heat level. I read and enjoy romance novels that range from sweet to hot.)

2.     Readers are bored with details of setting. (I’m not. A sense of place is important to me, and I prefer enough details to make the world of the book feel real.)

3.     Readers look for action in the first paragraph. (I look for something that makes me want to keep reading in the first paragraph. It may be action, but it may also be a quirky character, a place I want to know more of, or prose that falls upon my inner ear like music.)

4.     Readers resent the use of unfamiliar words. (That depends. The best writers make the definition of unfamiliar words clear from the context, and I like expanding my vocabulary.)

I’m not suggesting the people who made these comments were deliberately misleading their audiences. I am saying that overgeneralizations are logical fallacies. A sweeping generalization is one in which there seems to be sufficient evidence offered to draw a conclusion, but the conclusion drawn far exceeds what the evidence supports. Simply adding “some,” “many,” or “most” to these claims would make them more accurate. Doing so would also make me feel less like a reader who is being misrepresented or ignored. I may belong to a minority of readers, but I like to think my voice and my dollars count. And I don’t think I’m alone.

Are you bothered by sweeping generalizations about readers? What are your “soapbox issues”?

Exercising My Rights

A bill of rights is a formal summary of those rights and liberties considered essential to a people or group of people. Daniel Pennac in Better Than Life (1996), his wonderful book about reading, lists the rights of readers. Pennac's primary concern is with instilling a love of reading in children, but I think his list is important to any reader. These are rights I consider only slightly less important than those guaranteed to me by the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States. I exercise these rights freely, and I will defend them fiercely.

1. The right to not read any book.
I have the right to not read any author’s works, any subgenre, or any particular book that I find poorly written, offensive, boring, or just not to my tastes. I don’t read vampire books, scary thrillers, or erotica. I see my choice as a matter of personal taste, not a reflection of my intelligence or morality. There are also particular writers whose books I don’t read. It’s my dime and my time invested in the act of reading. I’m entitled to exercise my autonomy. I may be puzzled by your inability to appreciate the books I love, but I respect your autonomy too.

2. The right to skip pages.
I usually begin a book by skipping pages because I read the end first. Family members and friends look at me askance when I admit to this habit, but I’m not interested in the journey if the destination is wrong. I often skim or skip altogether scenes of graphic violence in romantic suspense. I also skip sex scenes that seem to me gratuitous, mechanical, or deep purple.

3. The right to not finish.
For years I felt that if I started a book, I had to finish it. No more. Now I rejoice in my right to give a book up at any point. Sometimes I read one page and know it’s not for me; sometimes I read a hundred pages or more before the book becomes a DNF. Occasionally I return to a DNF book and find that my mood or tastes have changed, but more often the DNF is just not my cup of tea.

4. The right to reread.
How often did you reread your childhood favorites? I’ve never known a child who did not reread. I’ve just never given up the habit. The major criterion I use to separate keepers from just books I enjoyed is whether the book is worth a reread. Rereading is like visiting old friends; it is warming, reassuring, and constant. I even have a reread shelf because often a passing reference to a book in conversation, real or virtual, or a connection in a new book to something I’ve read previously makes me long to return to the world of a particular book.

5. The right to read anything.
I read romance (single-title and category, historical and contemporary, sweet and sizzling), mystery, women’s fiction, literary fiction, history, memoir, poetry, and anything else that captures my fancy. My choices are unaffected by the prejudices of those who attach adjectives like “trashy,” and “esoteric” to my chosen reading material.

6. The right to escapism.
Some books I read to be confronted with realities beyond my own experience—the insanity of war, the grimness of real poverty, the suffering of the powerless. Sometimes I read to escape the disappointment, the heartbreak, or just the sameness of my own life. The right to escape is every bit as precious and necessary as the right to discover.

7. The right to read anywhere.
I live in a book-filled world. I have books in every room of my house, in my car, and in my purse. I read while I drink my morning coffee, when I have a solitary lunch, before I fall asleep at night. I read when I wait in my doctor’s office, when I stand in line at the grocery store, and when I get caught in traffic. So long as my reading endangers no one, I read anywhere.

8. The right to browse.
I am constitutionally unable to pass books without browsing. I go to the library or bookstore to pick up one book, and I examine a dozen or more, sampling pages. A quick trip to the grocery store is extended by fifteen minutes because I have to take time to browse the book section. Having dinner at a friend’s, I pick up a paperback from an end table and riffle through the pages.

9. The right to read out loud.
I love to read out loud. I grew up with a book-loving mother who not only read to her children when they were small but who also was wont to exclaim “Just listen to this” just before she read her adult children a passage from a current read that had struck her with its beauty, insight, or humor. I find myself doing the same thing. I am also a poet, and not surprisingly I relish the feel of the word in my mouth, its fall against my ear. When a prose passage I write seems wrong and I can’t find the problem, I read it aloud. I find the ear is often a better critic than the eye.

10. The right not to defend your tastes.
The summer I turned ten was a defining period in my life as a reader. That summer I discovered Emilie Loring and Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen and Agatha Christie, and ever since the canonical and the popular have filled my bookshelves and peppered my conversation. I read Proust and Putney and see no need to defend any of my choices.

Have you ever thought about a reader’s rights? Are there others you think should be added to Pennac’s list?