QQ No. 3
"How come there are so many badly written books published?"
Literary agents are often asked these QUESTIONABLE QUESTIONS by writers looking to understand how book publishing works. They’re reasonable questions and yet they reveal a misunderstanding about the industry. I hope this series of answers is useful.
3. “How come there are so many badly written books published?”
It’s tempting to answer, “because they sell so well”, and leave it at that. But that’s only partially true.
Google the bestselling books of all time, or bestsellers in the UK, or in Ireland, the US or your home country, and you’ll spot a few clunking bad prose stylists in there. But the lists contain many more cracking reads, so long as you’re a fan of whatever genre.
I’m not much for fantasy - Harry Potter is not for me. But I’ve dipped into the books and recognise great storytelling. A colleague at the agency here loved that series so much as a child that the experience of reading them – the feeling of pure book love - led her to launch her (now highly successful) career in publishing. The bestseller lists are full of books that generate that kind of connection.
It's more fun to point to those clunkers though.
For me, it’s the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy and any of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series, led by The Da Vinci Code. A caveat: I’ve only read bits of the first monster bestseller by each author. No one has ever claimed that their writing styles evolved much in later books. I'm not arguing that the writers are "undeserving of their success", whatever that might mean. Millions love their books. I’m not going to snicker at their pleasure, expressing the book snobbery I know to be an ugly consequence of my ‘taste’.
I simply notice what millions of their non-readers have also noticed; the writing is often awkward, the use of language clumsy, and the expressive range limited. Yes, these books could have been better written. A more interesting thought is whether a version of the stories written in more nuanced, varied and polished English would have sold so well. I suspect not. The banality of the writing style in the Fifty Shades books brought an amateur, awkward inexpert tone to the story. This fitted with the sense of heroine, Anastasia, as a BDSM neophyte, that the author wanted to convey. Logically, the style won’t have worked in the later trilogy, all narrated by the BDSM expert Christian Grey. I lack the curiosity to find out if that’s true.
The banality of the character’s interiority in Dan Brown isn’t a critical failure either. Because what he does have, as a writer, is an ability to keep the reader spinning pages. He keeps it moving through new scenes, characters and reveals. That’s an enviable skill lacking in many finer writers.
What both Dan Brown and E.L. James found were great subjects. Brown purported to bring the reader the ‘greatest hits’ History of Art and History of Christianity courses, spiced up with faux revelations of a Catholic conspiracy. Who wouldn’t figure the Catholic Church capable of such a wheeze? Unfortunately, their actual secrets are so much uglier and grubbier. The fictional version brought something positive: it energised all those weary tourists only visiting The Louvre and other high culture spots from a sense of obligation. James offered forbidden sex and who doesn’t want that?
Why are you asking about badly written books anyway? I suspect it’s because your own unsold manuscript is better written than many books you see on bookshelves.
We only ask this question in earnest about books.
People don’t tend to ask why there’s so much semi-scripted, clunky dull reality dramas on TV. We don’t query why there are so many films recycling the same storylines, populated by the same type characters walking through a scene we’ve seen a hundred times. Many people want better of books. It’s understandable. You love a beautifully crafted story. Your favourite books are gems to you. You’re not alone. They matter more than TV to many of us. TV often seems to dissolve as we watch it. Books endure. The pleasure in reading being deeper than we usually get with other media (though I have a short personal list of TV exceptions that held me as much as any book.)
But you need to get past this rarefied take on books.
Book publishing is a business.
If the folks will buy dreck then most publishers will sell it. It doesn’t mean that great writing won’t get publisher attention. If it’s within a captivating story by an author the publisher believes can win some media interest (one way or another), then many will be interested. If the author’s profile doesn’t sound promising for publicity purposes, many of those publishers won’t show the same interest. But there are still a few who will.
[ENDS]
Read disclaimer and hint for writers here.
The point we are each making is aligned. My piece is headed "Questionable Questions" . Each question- as I explained before I answering the first question - is one I am often asked by people but which I judge wrongheaded. My answer explains why.
It feels like complaining about 'badly-written content' the public adores is a bit patronising to the public; the public doesn't have a uniform reason for liking books.
Not everyone is a scholar, or has a geeky interest in the baroque art of the written word. Books are, for many, stories; and stories have always been consumed to entertain, enlighten or perhaps just provide escapism for people. If a book captures many (see Fifty Shades), then the skill of the author might not be in arranging beautiful words on page; but in the more invisible gift of constructing realities that reach into the collective soul; or at least large chunks of it.
Maybe we don't agree with the aesthetic of that collective soul; but who are we to dictate what it likes? Isn't that for scholars, sociologists, psychologists or others to figure out: why they like what they like?
Often times artists and professional intellectuals want to sneer at the masses' poor taste. But the masses like what they like; and then there is the longer term. When the more trite but emotionally/psychosexually gripping content like El James's expires in its era, retrospectively, people seem far more apt to recognise what in the forest of content of an era has survived the test of time. Will this popular book survive as a factoid of sociological curiosity, like the tulip fever? Or will it survive as a cultural beacon? Time usually sifts the wheat from the chaffs.
A lot of authors who seem wordsmiths and delight in their phrasing perhaps have nothing to say that wasn't said before; or that people can actually engage with. A lot of 'good writing' is a tad narcissistic. A lot of populist content is far deeper than assumed at first sight. Some people are so caught in page turners, dragged along by an engulfing narrative, they don't have mental time to stop and analyse the symbols, or deeper layers; then at the end, while having been entertained, they proclaim the work shallow, because they didn't notice the deeper layers. Often times more depth and quality is assumed merely because the work is very slow paced and ...'insists upon itself'.