Anyway, I appreciate that the editors were honest and said what they thought about where the market is currently. Personally, I rarely buy based on cover quotes, but when I glance through them, I never think to question author endorsements. I do raise an eyebrow when there’s a quote from a review site/magazine I’ve never heard of. I always wonder if that’s because DA/SBTB/Some other site I frequent didn’t have anything good to say about it. So it can go both ways.

In the next couple of years, IMO you’re going to see the influence of online communities — not necessarily in terms of sales, but in recognition that collective of voices is not coming from the margins — as much more easily discernible. But even now, if you don’t consider the fact that the Walmart buyer might have browsed online for reviews, even if it was just RT, you’re ignoring and/or missing out on the implications of the increasingly close relationship between online communication and off-line life for so-called “average” people. And I think that view is as distorted as the one that would insist online communities rule.

I resent, deeply resent, the quite obvious assumption of these PR folks and editors that they can serve us any old crap and that we will be too dumb to catch on to their tricks.

As to that, there are a lot of dumb people around, including myself, who are willing to buy books that you don’t seem to like. When I stop liking them, I stop buying.

One thing, though. I wish we knew who edits each book, so we can make book choices based on the editor. I think that info would be just as valuable as, say, knowing with DA reviewer likes/dislikes similar books that I do.

Page count inflation and hardcovers…well, that’s a totally different issue. (Yes, I paid $55 for a hardcover book. I AM DUMB!)

And it serves no purpose for them to stuff up the method intentionally.

Sure it does. They don’t actually have to do it, they just have to say they have the data that show that readers don’t want to read longer books forex. Voila, saved 20-40k worth of ink and paper but let’s raise the price by a buck. Or let’s talk about those novellas that are printed with unbelievably large margin and super large fonts and thrown on the market in HC for 25 bucks a pop…

Cynical? You betcha. I’ve been watching the romance industry for 25 plus years and their shenanigans are getting worse with every year that passes. And I resent, deeply resent, the quite obvious assumption of these PR folks and editors that they can serve us any old crap and that we will be too dumb to catch on to their tricks.

Btw, I’m not only talking about the Avon thing any longer, but what I’ve seen throughout of which the Avon PR debacle was just a more obvious offshoot.

Then *say that*, for heaven's sake, don't make it a matter of “it's what readers want.”

That’s just semantics to me. I always translate that in my head to: “it’s what OUR readers want”. And really, most companies won’t say they don’t want to be the market innovator. Even if they don’t.

@GrowlyCub: I’m saying that not everything in statistics needs cause and effect to get you a result that you can use.

Furthermore, using your individual buying habits is misleading because publishers don’t care what your individual habits are–they care about the behaviour of a significant sample of their target market.

I’m not quite as cynical as you are of the publishers’ market data. Sure, they could have flaws in their methods, but it would be stupid of them to skew those numbers so WE READERS can be pacified. That’s not what market research is about. They want to sell those books. And it serves no purpose for them to stuff up the method intentionally.

I mean I haven’t heard too much from them since they are not back until Tues but I agree with a lot of what Laura Kinsale said and still wonder how much of this has been blown up to more than it should have been.

When harpercollins laid off lots of people… most of my avon contacts stayed the same. I don’t know about you guys but it looked to me like the Romance div did ok. So they are doing something right at least for them.

And they are online, they are trying to change and do things differently maybe not at the speed we would like or in the ways we want but we can hope that will continue to change.

as far as I’m concerned we are back to the chicken or egg question.

If there are no books published that I like, I have two choices:

I can either buy no more books

or as an addict to the written word

I can buy books that aren’t what I really want, but are the closest approximation to what I want that’s available.

If there are only books with horrid covers and idiotic titles, but the content therein is what I want to read, I may still buy the books, but I bet you Avon’s marketing department now says, ‘look, shiny, those covers SELL and we have PROOF’.

And if I don’t buy the book, they don’t say anything at all, because they don’t *know* I didn’t buy the book because their horrid title and even worse cover insulted me.

Yes, we buy, but we can only buy what’s out there. Is that our fault? I don’t think so.

They go around telling us ‘readers don’t want historical accuracy’ and they tell us ‘readers have short attention spans, they don’t want 400+ page books’ and they say ‘the word billionaire and mistress in the title sell loads of books’. And I say, any set of statistical data can be falsified to tell you what you want to hear.

I’m sure it’s just totally accidental that publishers are perfectly happy to have editors spend less time editing and doing other related jobs, and that publishers had no vested interest at all to sell fewer pages for a higher price and that millions of customers have told them they hate those titles and covers, because they have data they can massage any way they want to do justify their shoddy business practices.

Your breast cancer example doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to me and I have no clue what you were trying to say.

ut maybe that's not their business strategy. Not everyone is out to be the market innovator. Maybe they're happy for others to find a trend that they can then run with.

Then *say that*, for heaven’s sake, don’t make it a matter of “it’s what readers want.” That’s what galls me. Just say, ‘hey, this and this sells, and that’s what we’re interested in, so we’re happy doing what sells.’ And if you don’t want to be that crass about your intentions, then maybe soft pedal the dismissive comments, at least publicly.

And let’s not forget the famous ‘it all starts with “The Virgin”‘ vision of Romance from Avon, either.

And yes, readers drive the market through sales. Everything else that the publisher does? It’s designed to sell books. You can have a million online voices that talk about how terrible certain kinds of books are, but if you have 2 million people buying those books, then guess who the publisher will listen to? (Or the other way: 1 million online people asking for weredoves but only 500,000 buying the book, and the publisher might question how well the online community reflects book buying preferences.)

I think what you’re talking about, though, is risk. And yes, maybe they can and should take more risks. On that we agree. But maybe that’s not their business strategy. Not everyone is out to be the market innovator. Maybe they’re happy for others to find a trend that they can then run with.

@GrowlyCub:

Unless you look for something to have an effect, you cannot see that effect. It’s like when somebody falls ill. Unless you test for X virus, you won’t know that X virus caused the disease and if there’s no test for X virus, you may never know that it caused the disease.

I’m no expert on statistics, but I don’t think you need to know the cause-effect relationship to determine what can affect something. Sometimes correlation is enough. Using a similar example, if 15 people working in a facility get breast cancer over the long-term, and it translates to a rate that’s 11 times higher than the national average, then even if you don’t know for sure what caused it, it’s a fair assumption that there’s something about where they’re working that caused it (and that’s a true example, by the way). More importantly, you’re not going to wait for cause-effect to decide to move those people out of there. Similarly, if I consistently sell 5000 copies of each book with a clinch cover at Walmart, then I’m going to keep using similar covers whether or not I can definitely prove cause-effect.

Now, I agree with you and Robin that the why/cause would give more of an insight into what readers want. But still, it’s not essential to getting those sales.

But the original interview answers I found to be candid.

I thought they showed the editors to be lacking in understanding, but it wasn’t the original interview that made me remark what you commented on. It was Jaffee’s response and the further comments made in the threads by Avon personnel.

I went over to SBTB to read Kinsale’s comments and I replied there. As far as I’m concerned the big question about these mythical numbers the editors have that we don’t, where do they come from, what do they mean and how do these editors know they mean what they think they mean?

Unless you look for something to have an effect, you cannot see that effect. It’s like when somebody falls ill. Unless you test for X virus, you won’t know that X virus caused the disease and if there’s no test for X virus, you may never know that it caused the disease.

I thought Kinsale’s Walmart argument was especially poor because just because the assumption is that a Walmart sale is generated by one of those average harried housemom readers throwing any old romance novel in her shopping cart among broccoli and frozen pizza, that doesn’t make it so.

I have no kids, nor do I buy indiscriminately. And the last Walmart sale was generated solely by DA and their twitter bookclub. So, if Avon or the publisher of that Ashley novel now assume this was a fly-by-night purchase, they didn’t look in the right place and I submit that the whole idea that a publisher can know how a Walmart sale came about is fallacy in and of itself.

But beyond that, Avon isn’t selling widgets; they are selling books, and they, like most publishers, keep pushing this line that the reader is driving the market. But what readers? I have long believed that it’s about what publishers *think* readers want, and that they largely base those decisions on what sells, but what sells isn’t necessarily beloved by readers (certainly not universally) — and certainly doesn’t necessarily recognize the pinnacle of the genre. Further, just because readers like book A doesn’t mean they won’t like book G, the one that isn’t like any other book. Which is, by the way, another pet peeve — the line that editors are always looking for something fresh. And yet we hear stories about, for example, how Adele Ashworth took her Avon editor’s “suggestion” that she make one of her heroines a virgin widow. Because the genre clearly doesn’t have enough of those. And yes, I realize that I’m pushing all editors into a big old generalized pile when I say that, but hey, since those Avon editors put all of us online readers into one big pile . . .

So one more editor from a house that publishers *very* traditional Romance wants to marginalize online readers by convincing us we’re too small a contingent to be important as far as sales go. Forgive me if I find that a might self-serving with a big old side of “anecdotal.”

Anyway, as for Laura Kinsale’s comments, chalk that up to the hundredth time or so I disagree completely with her view on something book related (I’m seriously so much better off not knowing what she thinks about a lot of this, lol, especially with a new book coming out finally). And I still don’t get how anything Chen and Macro said suggested “data.”

This is about a publisher saying out loud that they think their readers are idiots, by their actual words and by their behavior.

Really? Well, we read it differently, then. I do agree that the reply from the PR person wasn’t well thought out. But the original interview answers I found to be candid. Just because they said something I didn’t want to hear doesn’t mean they didn’t have a point. And again, I felt the way the questions were phrased was part of the problem.

@ldb:

I think the problem with the mindset of the editors is that they aren't really doing the best job of making the reading public happy, and if they aren't pleasing their target audiance they aren't really getting as many sales as they oculd. I mean how many people complain about historical accuracey and have decided never to read Avon again because they don't think they provide it

Well, certainly quite a few people online, but I wonder if that translates to the majority of readers/buyers? At ARRC, there was a very similar discussion, and I have to say that most readers in the audience sided with the comments regarding how blogs inflate issues and get fussed over silly things like champagne flutes and even sometimes question historical accuracy when in fact the author was correct. A LOT of readers read historical lite. That’s why publishers are still publishing them. (Not to mention there are readers like me who wouldn’t know if something was historically inaccurate to begin with.)

Put it this way. How sick am I of romances with Aussie characters who sound nothing like people I know? Or plotlines where a computer hacker breaks into a highly secure website without even breaking a sweat? Or contemporary heroines who’ve never heard of the morning after pill. Very sick of them. Will they ever disappear? Hardly.

instead of feeling like we have to defend our legitimacy every single time

This is not about legitimacy to me (I don’t blog). This is about a publisher saying out loud that they think their readers are idiots, by their actual words and by their behavior. I felt insulted by the whole editor and then publicity person interaction.

I’m still waiting for somebody to explain to me where all those traditional print media outlets are that review Avon romance and how they track the sales they make through ‘traditional’ advertising.

I have no love for AAR, I’m not partisan, I reacted to what I saw officials for a publishing house say in public. I felt they were condescending and when called on the carpet, they compounded their gaffe by insisting it was a conspiracy. Right…

I find it very depressing that these are the folks who get to decide what I will or will not be able to read. They are totally clueless and from the comments in the AAR thread and the reply by the PR person also unwilling to be educated or interested in their reader feedback. They say they are interested but their comments show that to be so much hot air.

But the bit that really got to me was the reply by Jaffee. That was a glaring example of PR 101, how NOT to do it.

Readers were already feeling (correctly or incorrectly) that Avon was disparaging and dismissing them and the online sites/communities they frequent. Instead of clarifying and/or doing damage control Jaffee comes out accusing AAR of misquotation and ‘invective’. Way to go… NOT.