The Reader Is Always Right
But Not About Everything
Today I want to talk about an old axiom that goes “the customer is always right.” But first I want to call back to a few weeks ago when I mentioned Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian. I read it yesterday—the yesterday as of my writing, not necessarily the yesterday as of your reading—and can now certify the hype. A very good book indeed; especially for a debut. Don’t get it if you don’t like reading about young people (college age). Otherwise do get it. A superb thriller.
I can say this with confidence because I am the customer in this case and therefore I must be right.
Before I get into how the customer’s rightness interacts with books specifically, I want to talk about the meaning of the phrase. There’s a lot of phrases we just throw around in wrong context without realizing it. For instance, in the phrase “the exception that proves the rule,” prove is intended in the scientific sense of test—this phrase traditionally means, here is an exception that we will put into the rule and see if it proves the rule true. Instead, people use this phrase to mean “here is an exception, in order to be true every rule must have one exception that contradicts it and this exception here is the one.” That makes no sense. But that’s how everybody uses it.
Another one is “the customer is always right.” People take this to mean “to provide good customer service, a worker must acquiesce to the customer’s every wish to make them happy.” That is not what it means. It means when the customer tells you what they like, they are always correct. The customer is always right in matters of their own taste. If the customer says they like steak well done with ketchup on top, that’s what they like. If they come into your clothing store and ask for help finding an outfit that mixes plaids and polka dots, you help them find it. That’s what they want. You don’t know better than the customer what it is they like or want. That’s what that means.
This is just as true of reading a book as it is with steak and clothes and handbags and automobiles and everything else. People like what they like, you can’t talk them out of liking something or into liking something else. You might talk them out of or into buying or reading something but you won’t talk them into liking or disliking it. No one determines their taste but them.
That said, when it comes to books, there’s a complication. Most books have many customers. I don’t mean that many individuals purchase and read many copies of the same book. I mean that an individual book usually has to pass multiple purchasing decisions before it ends up in a reader’s hands.
If I go to Barnes and Noble, browse the shelves, come up with a book, buy it, and read it, then that book was purchased two times by two customers. First, a buyer for Barnes and Noble (the retailer) purchased this book from the publisher through a distributor; second, I (the end user) bought the book from the retailer.
There have been other purchasing-related transactions before that in the intellectual property’s history; for example, an editor purchased rights to edit, reproduce, and sell the content from its author, probably with the brokerage of an agent. But for simplicity’s sake I’m only talking today about the chain of transactions and custody of the physical book object (or the e-reader file of the book).
Sometimes this is even further complicated. Think of a college textbook, for example. The decision about what book will be read is made by the professor teaching the class: they select the book they will require. Then the school’s bookstore purchases stock of that book to make available to students (the end users). In this case the end user (student) is not making the decision to purchase (the professor does) and then, many of these purchases will be funded by yet another party (the student’s parent, if they are funding the education).
Textbooks aren’t the only books that get sold this way. The purchasing decision for a children’s picture book is often made by an adult although the intended end user is a child they know.
The shortest book transaction chain you can get is when you buy a book directly from an author who has self-published. This could mean handing physical cash money to someone in exchange for a chapbook that was manufactured at a copy shop (I have done this), or you Venmo the author a sum of money directly and they mail you a book (I have done this), or you purchase a book directly from the author’s website (I have also done this). The next most essential transaction is buying a book published via KDP, as the book and money are exchanged between you and the author with only Amazon in the middle. Buying for yourself directly from a publisher’s website also cuts out the whole retail proposition (not every publisher offers this).
When we are writing a book, or self-publishing and thinking about marketing tools like the cover, we’re usually thinking about our intended audience—the people who will read that book and, perhaps more broadly, the people who are interested in that type of book. The audience for our book specifically and the audience for the genre. Those are the people we want to appeal to because we want the book to find its way into their hands and e-readers and get in front of their eyes.
But between the reader (the end user) and us (the content creator) stand a whole lot of intermediaries who will make decisions that effect the book’s availability and visibility to those end users. These are all the people who examine the book and decide
Whether to make it available in their store
To whom they will send an email blast about the book
Where and how it will be placed on a shelf for purchase
Where it will be advertised
To whom the cover is designed to appeal
These considerations are especially important if you are writing nonfiction (which is often purchased as a gift) or kidlit (often purchased by an adult on behalf of the young reader). You need to appeal to your end user, the reader, as your ultimate goal as an author is for your words to be read. But you must also appeal to the person making the retail purchasing decision, the customer, if you want your book read. Sometimes they’re the same person, and sometimes they’re not.
The other thing you should consider in terms of “the customer is always right” when it comes to your book is—there’s no accounting for taste (as they say) and no arguing with it. If someone says they don’t like your book, they don’t like it. This only means they don’t like it. It doesn’t mean your book is bad. It might be or it might not be, but a book being “objectively” bad—if there even is such a thing—is not the only reason or even the most probably reason why someone doesn’t like it.
Not every book is going to be to everyone’s taste. Every reader I’m sure has examples of books they did not like that would not generally be regarded as objectively terrible. Personally I did not enjoy Outlander, or The Dresden Files, or Annihilation. A lot of people like these books and I did not. Annihilation just didn’t do it for me. I can’t point to what it was about that book and it’s sequels that I didn’t like, I just didn’t get absorbed as much as I need to enjoy a book. It was fine. It just wasn’t for me. Outlander I disliked both on principle (a ridiculous amount of acquaintance and spousal rape) and on aesthetic merit (I just didn’t enjoy the prose or plot). That still doesn’t mean this is a bad book; it just means my personal dislike of it was based both in taste and in principle. And then Dresden Files was a weird mix of fun concept, setting, and plot but poor writing, wooden characters, and objectionable principles (too much racism and misogyny for me) that made the series a DNF (did-not-finish) for me after five books.
All this to say, there could be a lot of reasons why someone doesn’t enjoy your book; none of those reasons mean that no one will ever enjoy your book. Finding the right audience, the audience who is disposed to liking what you have written, is the key. Marketing it to people who you would like to read it but who are saying “no, this is not to our taste” is not going to win you readers or acclaim.
For instance, if you’ve written a sci-fi romance, your audience is people who like sci-fi romance. Your audience is not “people who like sci fi and also people who like romance.” Lots of romance readers don’t like sci fi and lots of sci fi readers don’t like romance. You might pick up a few readers from the outer circles of the Venn diagram but the meat and potatoes of your readership are in the overlap.
When you think about who you envision reading your book—whether you’re drafting, revising, querying, self-publishing, whatever—make sure you’re specific and realistic with yourself. “This book has something for everyone” or “Anyone could enjoy this book” are not helpful. There’s no book on the planet with universal appeal. I know people who never liked Harry Potter; people who don’t like To Kill a Mockingbird; people who hated One Hundred Years of Solitude. It doesn’t matter how objectively good or how marketable your book is, there will be people who don’t like it.
Don’t waste your valuable time—or any other valuable resources—trying to convince someone to like something they don’t like, or criticizing someone for not liking something you think they should like or for liking something you think they should not. Just never do that. Let people like what they like and dislike what they dislike.
Don’t waste your time and energy beating yourself up when someone doesn’t like something you wrote. It’s fine. If someone gives you actionable feedback on your writing, including what they liked or did not like about it, that is useful for you to have and know. Maybe you choose to use it, and maybe you don’t. If, on the other hand, someone tells you they don’t like your writing and they leave it at that, remember: You only received information about their taste. You did not receive information about your writing.
If someone says “I did not like this” about content they consumed, they are indisputably correct. If someone says “this is objectively terrible” about content they consumed, they are almost always wrong.
Hey are you ready to hear about NFTs, crypto, and blockchains never again? Then probably don’t read next week because I’m going to talk about the Marie Lu thing. Have a pleasant weekend and stay warm, or cool. The weather is unpredictable. Stay whatever temperature you enjoy being.
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