People need bestsellers

The social quality of literature is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere PR, because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter

Ursula K. Le Guin

Bestsellers are inevitable. As long as books are being sold, some books are going to sell more copies than other books. Ursula K. Le Guin's complaint, expressed in an essay called "Staying Awake" first published in Harper's, seems to be about the phoniness of the bestseller process.

Publishers try to decide ahead of time which books should be bestsellers, and these are the books they invest money in for big ad campaigns. Some promotions describe books as bestsellers even before they are available in stores. Some books become instant bestsellers because previous books by the same author were bestsellers. Titles, cover illustrations, cover blurbs and prominent bookstore displays can also help create bestsellers out of what Le Guin calls "boring, baloney-mill novels."

Our own idea of what is boring may differ from hers, yet the point remains that the best-selling books are not necessarily the best books.

The term "bestseller" is quite imprecise. To readers, it probably suggests a book in the top ten on the New York Times bestseller list, yet books are routinely described as bestsellers when they are much farther down the list. Books can become bestsellers with the sale of surprisingly few copies.

Ideally becoming a bestseller should reflect quality as well as quantity. That it does not is part of Le Guin's complaint. Her own books — including Words Are My Matter, her last one — probably did not sell as many copies as she thought they deserved.

Yet quality is not a major factor for most consumers. Or perhaps more accurately, just as each of us has a different idea of what's boring, so we each have a different idea of what is good. Or what is good enough. More people drive Fords than Lincolns. More eat at McDonalds than sit-down restaurants with tablecloths. Bad books usually cost just as much as good books, but even so most readers favor books they can easily read and easily understand without having to think too much about them.

And, as Le Guin points out, people like books they can talk about. Literature, as she says, has a social function. People like reading books that "everybody else" is reading. Some of us may try to impress by having a Camus or a Faulkner under our arm, but more of us would rather be seen, at least by our friends, carrying The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave. Actually finishing any of these books hardly matters, as long as we make the desired impression. That can be worth the price of a new book.