Did you know that between 500,000 and one million books are published in the U.S each year? That doesn’t include all the self-published books which drives to total to between three and four million a year (of course, if we take the four million figure, that’s one new book per 83 people). It makes me wonder whether we need all these books. And my experience as a reviewer suggests that many of them are “just OK.” They may be a satisfying read (and sometimes agonizingly not). They may offer some new insights. But I suspect most will be unknown in ten years and very few in fifty.
Is it OK to write and publish OK books?
One answer to this question is that many books serve a niche audience. What is just OK for me may be delightful, or at least useful for someone in that audience. And if that audience is large enough, it can have a respectable press run and maybe make the author enough money so that he or she can write another book and keep body and soul together, hopefully improving at the writerly craft.
There is also the response that we don’t always know the difference between an OK book and a significant work. Significant works can flop, and OK writing can sometimes take off. Some writers, like Colleen Hoover develop followings. Using BookTok and other online media has propelled some unknowns into best sellers. For all our high tech, word of mouth is also important. We buy books that our friend circles are buzzing about.
At the same time, all those books dropping every week are pushing other titles onto backlists, and often into obscurity within weeks or months unless it makes it to the best seller lists. And that has to happen quickly or it won’t, in most cases. I sometimes see backlist books promoted during a special season, like Black History month, or when the subject of the book is in the news.
I can’t help but wonder if good books, particularly from lesser known authors, fail to get noticed. I’ve reviewed some that I thought at least as good as front list, best selling books. It’s often that you hate to take chances (and so do booksellers) on unknowns.
I guess it comes down to the freedom of the marketplace and the willingness to take risks and the determination that the rewards are worth it. If an acquisition editor wants to publish your book, why not give it a shot? If you want to self-publish and you can accept the start-up costs, why not? Writing is not easy work, and for many who do it, they can’t not write.
Finally, maybe there is something to being profligate. I think of how many seeds my maple drops every year to reproduce itself. And a vanishingly tiny percentage do. Perhaps less seeds might mean none would grow. Perhaps it is like that with books. And maybe the books that stand out from the competition are all the better.
And it may say something about our literacy, freedom and relative economic well-being that so many are able to write at least OK books (although AI generated books may present a future challenge). At the end of the day, as challenging as it may be to sift through many OK books to find the gems, I’m OK with that! It means more chances for great writers to emerge.
