I will lead with a disclaimer: I am not a librarian. To elaborate, I am not a librarian in this reality. In another life? Well who knows, maybe I am a librarian. In the other, better timeline—the one in which no one turned on the Large Hadron Collider twelve years ago and Harambe is still alive and I have seen Black Widow (2021?) three times in the theater and several more times on home video by now—perhaps I am a librarian. So that is the authority from which I write today’s article. Alternate-reality Catherine may or may not have this expertise. None of us can say for sure that she does not.
Shelf Life today is about the science of readers’ advisory, a library science skill, and how to use some basic knowledge of the skill to assess the qualities of writing you admire in order to understand why you like it and how you can emulate it effectively in your own writing.
Readers’ advisory is a service provided by librarians and booksellers all over the world. The core of the service is finding out what a patron likes to read, and then making targeted suggestions of other books (sometimes called readalikes) that they might enjoy based on what they have enjoyed in the past.
We all know when we like a book but it’s not always that easy to say what specifically we liked about it. My friend’s son is a fan of the Spy School series by Stuart Gibbs, and since I have a YA boarding school writing project on one of the backburners I Zoomed them to pick his brain a bit. It was a challenge for him to put into words what he likes about the series even though he’s an incredibly intelligent and thoughtful kid. I had trouble even coming up with the right questions to ask, and I spent four years in college writing about books. I don’t usually have a great grasp of why I liked or even loved a book—though I’m usually pretty clear on why I dislike books.
When a librarian is trying to figure out what a patron would like to read, they may ask the patron to name or describe a book they’ve enjoyed. For instance, someone was doing a reader’s advisory for me, I might say “Well one of my favorite books is The Daughter of Smoke and Bone.” I might be able to describe what I like about it, or I might not. But the book-recommending professional could review their knowledge of that title and discern its prominent characteristics (appeal terms), for instance, that it is a fiction novel, in the fantasy genre, written for young adults, with an adventurous storyline, and a medium pace. Armed with that information, they could probably recommend several more books that have the same characteristics, and I would likely enjoy those as well.
Anyway, I have a book club reading novels that fit the dark academia aesthetic. In essence: dark themes, academic settings. Dead Poets Society. The Secret History. That kind of thing. Pretty much everybody liked something about our first selection, The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Afterward, though, we kept having trouble reaching consensus on what to read next. Everybody liked something different about The Secret History (except Tim, who hated everything about it, but really wants to be in a book club).
To sort out how to proceed, I took a data-driven approach informed by some of the principles of readers’ advisory. I made a list of about forty characteristics of books—some dark-academia specific, and some about books generally—and a list of every title I could find in the dark academia space, and launched a survey.
The survey asked three meaningful questions about content. The first two referenced the aforementioned list of forty characteristics: First, select all of the characteristics that you like and want more of. Although some of the characteristics were contradictory, none were mutually exclusive. For instance, you could say that you liked books longer than five hundred pages and books shorter than five hundred pages. That just means you’re open to a book of any length. (Except, I guess, a book exactly five hundred pages long.) Next, select all of the characteristics (from the same list) that you dislike and want less of. In theory, options selected would be exclusive of those that a respondent selected in the previous question.
Finally, respondents were asked to select all of the books they were interested in reading from the list of thirty-seven titles I had assembled. This list was primarily made up of books shelved as dark-academia on Goodreads, with a small smattering of additional books from adjacent aesthetics (eg, light academia, dark bureaucracy).
The survey received a 100% response rate, because the members of the Dark Academician Conclave are both diligent and accustomed to humoring Catherine (as well as, incidentally, more than usually attractive). From the responses, I was able to sort book characteristics into three meaningful categories: Things that most of us liked and wanted more of; things that most of us disliked and wanted less of; and things that nobody especially disliked. (There was not a single characteristic that wasn’t liked by at least one person.)
It turned out that most of the people in the book club were interested in reading medium- or fast-paced books written for adults, with a main character who is a woman, a diverse cast of characters, relatable characters, and shorter than five-hundred pages in length. Conversely, most of the respondents did not want to read slow-paced books, books with a main character who is a man, or books written for young adults. More than half of respondents preferred books that did not include science fictional, fantasy, or supernatural elements.
That information let me quickly whittle the titles thirty-seven titles down to a list of six by discarding all slow-paced books, all books longer than five-hundred pages, all books with a main character who is a man, all young adult titles, and all the sf/f and supernatural/magical titles.
Here’s where things get interesting (“finally,” you probably said). Half of respondents flagged Possession by A.S. Byatt, The Likeness and The Secret Place by Tana French, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, and Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl as want-to-read titles although those are all slow-paced books, several of them longer than five-hundred pages. Likewise, half of respondents wanted to read If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio, even though the main character is a man.
In the end, book club landed on a list of twelve titles to keep us going for the year to come and I landed on some interesting insights for you to apply to your reading and writing life, to wit:
If you can identify the characteristics that trend on the bestseller lists, you’ll have a better idea of what the market is hungry for;
If you understand what you like about the books you read, you will better understand how to deliberately shape your writing; and
Sometimes, when you examine the data, you find the things that you think you like don’t match up with what you actually like, in practice.
Whenever a book comes out that captures a huge and enthusiastic readership—those literary phenomena that usually end up with movies, merchandise, theme parks, and so on—you see a ton of copycats over the next few years as authors and publishers try to capitalize on the hype. For instance, Twilight went to auction in 2003 and published in 2005. It debuted at fifth place on the NYT best seller list and continued to sell incredibly well through 2008 (not to say it’s not still selling strongly today; it is). It inspired a lot of supernatural romance fiction in the years that followed as everyone scrambled to write or sign the “next Twilight.”
Take a look at the YA offerings from the 2008-2009 era like Hush, Hush, Shiver, City of Bones, Halo, Beautiful Creatures. Angels, demons, witches, werewolves, monster hunters, fantasy love triangles. A lot of these sold well and a few of them got a movie but none of them became phenomena. The “next Twilight” wasn’t a fantasy at all, it was The Hunger Games. Bella and Katniss couldn’t be more different and their stories plot couldn’t be more different. Yes, both of them have a love triangle but the love triangle in Twilight is Bella’s whole life while the love triangle in The Hunger Games is Katniss’s lowest possible priority.
So that set off a new arms race for the next Hunger Games and the cycle repeated with publishers snatching up sci-fi girl-warrior offerings like Divergent (which almost, but didn’t quite, rise to the level), Legend, The Maze Runner, and The Fifth Wave. I don’t think we’ve really seen anything since then to match Twilight or The Hunger Games—although until I see how An Ember in the Ashes film does, I can’t rule out Sabaa Tahir—but the next closest things we’ve had since then have been The Fault in Our Stars and The Hate U Give, which don’t fall under the sf/f umbrella at all. A lot of people in the publishing industry have said to me, over the years, that this is just another in a long line of examples that go to show you can never predict what will be the next big bestseller, because it’s always something totally different.
But maybe looking at them through the lenses of a librarian’s glasses tells another story. Different as all of these books seem on the surface, if you examine their fundamental characteristics closely you will note they have some overlapping appeal terms. They’re all first-person narratives told by teenage girls, for instance. They’re all emotional stories with an element of dread or menace hanging over them. They’re all well-known for engaging struggling or reluctant readers—people who don’t like reading—which is a huge insight into why they sell so well. And honestly the plots aren’t even all that different, considering each story features a young woman who is in some way removed from her familiar environment and must adapt to a new one.
So that’s market hunger, in a nutshell. I’m not saying that you can use readers’ advisory to predict the next bestseller but it can help you look at elements beyond plot to see what the reading public—or any segment of it—want to read right now.
A lot of us, I think, get inspired to write when we read something that resonates with us. We want more of that and writing is a way to bring more into existence. Maybe you’ve had the experience of writing something, reading it back to yourself, and getting the sense that while you captured the plot elements you had in mind, something about the way you told the story is just off and you can’t put your finger on it. That’s another opportunity to apply some readers’ advisory techniques to start thinking about the ways in which it feels off to you.
Consider your top three or top five favorite books in terms of elements like pace, tone, narrative style, character, themes, and storyline. Compare the trends you spot with your own writing. Do you generally prefer fast-paced stories, but you wrote yours with a slow paced? What kind of narrator do you lean toward in the writing you like, and is that the same kind of narrator you used? Try to identify the narrative elements that appeal most to you in the books you love best, and find ways to work those into your own unique stories.
And finally, make sure you read outside of your comfort zone. Readers’ advisory is great for helping you find books that you’re likely to enjoy based on what you’ve enjoyed before—and you can branch out almost indefinitely—but every now and then it’s good for all of us to pick up something completely new and different. If you haven’t done that in a while, just read 17776. That’s probably new and different enough to hold anybody over at least for a little while.
Make sure you stay tuned for next Tuesday’s Shelf Life on how identify the best beta readers for your work and how to ask them to do you that solid favor of reading your rough stuff. See you then!
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