Books: an elite consumption
In the United States, 320 million inhabitants, only 35 million adults have read five books or more in 2015. In Italy it barely reaches 5 million. With us it's the fault of the good weather because in Finland there are many more readers without being smarter than the Italians. Just to make a somewhat rash comparison with the new media, in the US there are as many 35 million subscribers to the streaming service Netflix, who have been around for six years not centuries, who pay less than ten dollars a month to watch movies and TV.
The book industry – publishers, authors, agents and booksellers – have the gargantuan problem of seating 80% of the planet's population more than once at the book table. These people read and write, consume television and music, go to the cinema, enjoy video games but do not read books or read only when there is a book such as Harry Potter or the Shades, i.e. every 10 years or so.
Desolating, but not all is lost, indeed. Today there are almost 3 billion media devices in the pockets of culture and entertainment consumers on which one can even read or listen to a book. So the potential of the market is immense. But the book industry seems to be doing something else entirely, staring in the rear view mirror. The mail is not at all whether it will be ebook or book, whether it will be Amazon or not Amazon, whether it will be a bookstore or online: these are trifles compared to the challenge, not only of bringing new people to buy and perhaps read a book more, but also of convincing those who already read to keep the time they dedicate to this demanding activity.
The competition from other media is deadly and is growing at the rate of Moore's law. In the USA in 2016, 400 television series hungry for audiences and their free time will be produced and distributed, which has essentially not grown. Even the strong reader will end up taking time away from the book and dedicating it to following, for example, House of Cards and the far-fetched plots of the Underwood spouses. An episode of the series occupies 55 minutes and an entire season 12 hours of non-exclusive time; Donna Tartt's Goldfinch requires 32 hours and 29 minutes of exclusive time. When you read a book you can't do anything else. With an episode of House of Cards you can also cook or iron.
The status quo does not add readers, on the contrary…
At this point one thing is certain. With the current production, content and format of books, non-book-readers will never come and sit at that table. Their time will continue to be distributed between television, cinema, video games, music, travel and entertainment. They'll never spend 13 hours reading the latest top-rated thriller in the New York Times.
It is necessary to innovate and innovate with enormous courage. For now, the only one to innovate is Amazon and for every step forward that Amazon makes the industry take, there are two backwards by the established industry, large publishers and great authors who have now united like the Celtic tribes against Rome .
It is therefore surprising that one of the great authors, perhaps the largest bestseller factory and certainly the most frequenter of the best-selling book rankings, has decided to accept this challenge and is determined to act. If James Patterson moves, something happens. Because Patterson is not just a natural person, he is a shop, a scriptorium. A team of 25 professionals and creatives flanks and supports him in writing and in all activities related to the conception and promotion of content. The award-winning company James Patterson placed 2015 titles in the "New York Times best-seller list" in 36, selling 325 million copies worldwide. In 2016, around 40 titles will be published in his name. Patterson is also in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first writer to surpass one million copies sold. He is also the richest writer in the world and, according to Forbes, earned $2015 million in 89.
James Patterson's "new deal" coincides with that of Amazon
To win new readers, Patterson has the same plan in mind as Jeff Bezos; the second he wants to achieve with the price and the first with the content. They are made for each other. Patterson's idea, I quote verbatim from Alexandra Alter's NYTimes article that tells this story, is “to sell books to people who prefer television, video games, movies and social media to reading”. How? Here's Patterson's plan: make them shorter, cheaper, more compelling in the plot and above all available everywhere. Aren't these the same things Amazon says? Of course I am! Only now to say it is the most mainstream author in the world and no longer the "public danger # 1" of literature. This is of great value and can truly open a new season for the entire book industry.
In June 2016 will be released the first title of a new series called BookShots that Patterson has designed with his publisher Little, Brown and Company, a brand of the Hachette group. 2/4 books will come out a month that can be read in a single reading session of an hour, an hour and a half, the time for a transfer, a lunch break, a wait for the doctor. “It will be like reading a movie,” said Patterson in presenting the project to the press. The price will be less than $5, so just over half the price of a ticket to see a movie on the big screen (in the US the average cost is $8,61).
BookShots titles will be available as books, ebooks, and audiobooks. They will also be available in bookstores, online, but also in pharmacies, from greengrocers to grocery stores and in all points of sale. “It will work – said the head of Hachette Michael Pietsch – because there is Patterson who is well known by the general public”.
Novels and short essays
The novel or short or serialized essay is certainly not an invention of today, but it was one of the most interesting innovations brought by the new ebook format, which allowed this genre to emerge from the oblivion into which it had fallen during the industrial era of the mass media, which had eclipsed its success at the end of the XNUMXth century and the first decade of the XNUMXth century. There have been countless experiments: Amazon's Kindle Singles and Short Reads, Apple's Quick Reads iBooks, Barnes & Nobles' Nook Snaps, Byliner's current affairs essays and Mondadori's XS in Italy and so on. These were initiatives, even successful ones, which only found space online and rarely landed in traditional book channels or saw the usual well-known publishers as promoters. It was the new market players and the independents who took the path of the short and concentrated novel.
It is no secret that medium-large publishers do not find it convenient, also due to the channels they use, to publish short books under 100 pages. These books have too low a profit margin to be strategic or at least interesting.
Little books can be great reading, but little books are a headache for publishers. "Small books don't go out in bookstores - said Pietsch -, because it's difficult to notice them, because they don't capture the attention of the media and they are economically disadvantageous". But… the “Patterson brand” and new distribution channels can eliminate these disadvantages and turn them into strengths.
Great short masterpieces
Yet of the great masterpieces of literature such as The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Invisible Cities by Italio Calvino, The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, The Fall of Albert Camus , La bella estate by Cesare Pavese are short novels. Allan Poe thought that there should be no other literature than that to be read in one breath. Otherwise the unit of effect would have been lost. He also thought that the short story was superior to the novel. Thus Poe writes in his 1846 essay, The Philosophy of Composition:
It therefore appears evident that there is a precise limit – the limit of a single sitting – for the length of a literary work… since it is evident that the brevity must be in direct proportion to the intensity of the effect that is intended to be produced .
The intensity of the effect, that is the point such a writing must produce. And Patterson certainly does not lack the talent and craft to achieve this effect.
Some commentators have already branded this initiative as non-literature and non-reading. Something that, even if it gets results, will bring nothing significant to literature. That's what the Paris Review thinks. With a food comparison, Sadie Stein, in an interesting article entitled But Is It Reading?, comments BookShots as follows:
It is more akin to a special dinner than an everyday one – a luxury most people cannot afford and therefore cannot develop any taste for. In short, it is not serious reading and its effect ends with consumption and does not consolidate into behavior. Coming and going between the two reading styles (the "serious" one and the BookShots one) - concludes Stein - is difficult for the reader. In fact I don't consider them part of the same mental, emotional process.
The editorial plan of Patterson & Co
In 2016, 21 BookShots titles will be published, including thrillers, science fiction, mystery and romance novels. The first two will be released in June 2016: Cross Kill written by Patterson starring the popular Pattersonian character Alex Cross and Zoo II a science fiction novel co-written by Patterson and Max DiLallo. Novels not written in whole or in part by Patterson will bear the Hollywood-derived "James Patterson Presents" label. After all, it is precisely the experience of cinema that inspired Patterson
At the end of 2016, the prolific writer plans to expand production beyond fiction with content related to political, socio-economic and cultural current events. Short, intense, pressing and packaged essays for the reader who follows talk shows or news and loves to get informed beyond the daily fact. There is already talk of a first book entitled Trump vs. Clinton. It will be a good challenge, not between the two probable candidates, but James Patterson against everyone to convince non-readers-of-books to carve out 10 hours a year to consume at least five. Whatever the outcome may be, standing ovation for James Patterson. Let's hope someone follows him.
