Books do sell

Well of course I write for the big bucks, huge prestige, and pure adulation of millions of fans. While the limos, champagne on first class flights and attractive strangers constantly opening their bank accounts and boudoirs to me gets tiresome, having my own line of fashion apparel saves me from having to shop for clothes. Oh wait, that’s some other kind of writer. I write for professional publications. Sorry, lost in fantasy for a moment… from “Why I Write for Publication” KQWeb, May/June 2001

A good friend sent me a blog post written by Seth Godin - “Why Books Don’t Sell.”  In the post, Godin explores the odds of writing a “hit” book. He concludes “...we see that 85% of all traditional books published last year sold fewer than 5,000 copies each in their format. Those are extraordinarily bad odds.” 

In my daydreams, I write a single book that sells so well that I can live richly from the royalties and never put fingers to keyboard again. If I remember correctly, J.D. Salinger did this with Catcher in the Rye. My writing hero.

I, on the other hand, have written and published six books with international publishers, two second editions, and one self-published little volume between 1997 and 2015.* I made about as much in royalties each year as I did from a single speaking engagement or workshop. Was my time wasted? Was I a failure as a writer as Godin seems to suggest since I never really sold an immense number of copies?

While the authors whose names appear on the best seller lists get the fame, my assumption is that most of us who are serious writers write for groups far down the length of the long tail. My books were not written to be read on the toilet or while sunning on the beach. The primary audiences were school librarians, K-12 teachers, and school administrators. A couple titles might have been marketed to parents of K-12 students who were interested in how educational technology might impact their kids. It was never my intent or aspiration to appear on any best seller list. I don’t know the exact numbers, but my books in their niche sold well. Well enough anyway for the publishers to ask for more titles and second editions.

What did make publishing books an economic benefit to me primarily came with the reputation I gained as an author garnered the attention of organizers of conferences and staff development coordinators of educational workshop. As I mentioned, I made more money speaking at a single conference than I did from an entire year of book royalties. I always joked that conference planners made the assumption that if one could write, one could also talk. I guess I must have done well enough since kept getting asked to present at nearly 200 conferences and educational organizations over the course of my career. Thanks, in large part, to my professional writing.

Oh, I did find copies of my books in a couple surprising places. The Singapore National Library had one of my books in its catalog when I spoke there on the occasion of its grand opening in 2005. But probably my proudest moment was when I found a copy of one of my books in the education section of the local Barnes & Noble - and a grandson was with me who asked if I was that Doug Johnson. 

Books do sell, Seth. They sell ideas. They sell feelings. They sell stories. They sell reputations. They sell joy - for both the reader and the writer. They may not always sell in a commercial sense, but when the right audience is found, every book sells.

*

• Indispensable Librarian: Surviving and Thriving in School Media Centers in the Electronic Age, Linworth 1997
• Indispensable Teacher’s Guide to Computer Skills, Linworth 1998.
• Indispensable Teacher’s Guide to Computer Skills, 2nd ed. Linworth 2002.
• Teaching Right From Wrong in the Digital Age: An Ethics Guide for Parents, Teachers, Librarians, and Others Who Care about Computer-Using Young People, Linworth 2003. (Awarded a 2003  "outstanding achievement in parenting materials" from Parent's Guide to Children's Media Inc.)
• Machines Are the Easy Part, People Are the Hard Part: Observations on Making Technology Work in Schools. Beaver’s Pond Press, 2004.
• School Libraries Head for the Edge. Linworth, 2009
• The Classroom Teacher’s Technology Survival Guide, Jossey-Bass, 2012
• Indispensable Librarian. 2nd edition, ABC/Clio, 2013
• Teaching Outside the Lines, Corwin 2015

It’s not how many books you read

My reading history according to Goodreads.

I am a long-time fan of the social networking site Goodreads. Since 2014, I have recorded 532 books “read.” I have 53 friends with whom I share titles and reviews. And I have participated in the Reading Challenge for a number of years, slowly increasing the number of books I intend to read to 52 - one per week.

While I plan to continue using Goodreads to record and share comments about the books I read, I am going to abandon the Reading Challenge. It makes me too anxious.

Motivated by watching the new Shogun streaming series, I decided to re-read Clavell’s novel on which it is based. I believe this is the third time I’ve greatly enjoyed this 1000 page tome. 

The problem is that I have been reading it since April 7th - for well over two weeks. It’s completely destroyed the pace of books I need to complete to meet my 52 book challenge for 2024. Yes, I could listen to audiobooks (I still think of them as books-on-tape.) on long drives. I could purposely select short, easy-to-read titles. I suppose I could even up the number of hours each day I dedicate to reading books, cutting back on newspapers, click bait, and solitaire. 

Instead I will ignore the challenge. There are just some authors (Clavell, Michener, McMurtry, Tolkien among them) who do spin very long, but very good tales I just can’t abandon. I read non-fiction titles that may not be as gripping as thrillers and so are less compelling to read and so take longer. Like walking or biking, I need to relax and enjoy the experience rather than try to meet some extrinsic, self-imposed velocity. 

And I will be happier for it.

Cutting post office expenses

…the Postal Service posted a $6.5 billion loss in the 2023 fiscal year, and it’s on track to lose more than $8 billion in fiscal 2024…Nearly 20% of the nation’s first-class mail was delivered late in late March… “USPS got billions in aid, and now says it needs more”, Star Tribune April 17, 2024

Each morning I receive an email from the post office showing me the mail I can expect to receive that day. It is 99% junk mail - paper advertisements for everything from house siding to cremation services. 

Although I am of the “Boomer” generation, I conduct almost all my financial business - bills, bank statements, credit card balances and payments, and tax filings online. What magazines and newspapers I read, I view online with the exception of the dismal little weekly local paper delivered on Friday that takes five minutes to read and another one minute to recycle. When asked, I automatically choose to receive all communications from organizations I interact with electronically. I do receive (and send) the rare “thank you” card which I enjoy. But the little online automated greetings are just fine with me too.

The USPS could go away tomorrow and I can’t say that I would miss it very much. 

I grew up with a mailbox at the end of the lane on a farm. The daily mail was exciting. The Des Moines Register came everyday, placed in that mailbox by a mailman we knew by name. Whom we gifted on Christmas. Greeting cards and handwritten letters appeared often. We were proud that my great-uncle Bob, a WWI vet, worked in the town’s post office. The mail, the party line telephone, AM radio, and over the air television were my childhood and young adult media. 

But sometimes sentimentality needs to be set aside. With the exception of package delivery driven by online ordering, the services of the USPS are irrelevant to many of us - even cranky old Boomers. It seems package delivery could be handled by FedEx, UPS, or Amazon just as well or better.

Yeah, I know there are people who don’t do email, don’t do online banking, don’t have smartphones or computers or internet access. (I think both of them live in Montana.) So for a while, anyway, the postal service needs to continue. 

But why not start scaling it back now. I could certainly live with getting my mail every other day or even just once a week. Stop Saturday delivery, for sure. Wouldn’t that cut down on the number of delivery persons needed, trucks to buy and maintain and fuel? Increase the number of automated mailing stations and increase their capacity for larger packages. Don’t we have better things on which to spend our tax dollars?

I suspect Ben Franklin would roll over in his grave if read this but, Ben, times have changed. (But I still appreciate bifocal lenses in my glasses.)