This is the 255th edition of SHuSH, the official newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. If you’re new to SHuSH, push the button:
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You know how sometimes you pick up a book because you like the author’s previous work, and you get ten pages in and think, “why am I wasting my time on this?”
It’s not just with books. There are film directors whose entire libraries I’ve watched and enjoyed, and others who, to my taste, run hot and cold. Same with music, the visual arts, and probably every other medium of artistic expression. That you’ve liked one piece of work by a writer or artist opens you up to trying something else by them, but your satisfaction is by no means guaranteed.
The original work that you liked might have dealt with a subject or theme of particular interest to you, might have had an appealing one-off character or quirk of style, or you might just have been in a good mood when you read it.
Or maybe it’s not you: the author might have put more effort into the first book, or said everything he had to say in it. Maybe after its success she did a shit-ton of coke, or decided to write for a better audience.
The point is that even work that you have reason to expect will deliver a comparable experience often fails to do so.
I’ve been thinking about comparables this week because we’re preparing our go-to-market materials for our spring books.
You need buckets of information to present a book to the market. Most of it will be captured under the heading of metadata, which is all the info about a particular work used to describe, categorize, or improve the discoverability of it.
The descriptive stuff is straightforward: title, subtitle, author, ISBN number (which you get from a registry), format (hardcover or softcover), page count, trim size (say 6”x9”), price, info about any previous editions, etc.
The content or subject metadata is more nuanced, and important to how your book surfaces in searches. You need a description of the book (the kind you read on Amazon or anywhere else online). You need keywords relating to the book’s themes or content or audience. And you need BISAC codes. BISAC stands for Book Industry Standards and Communications. There are more than 3,000 BISAC codes. They are standard subject categories relied upon by booksellers and librarians to sort books into categories. They look like this: FIC009000 – Fiction / Fantasy / General; or BIO026000 – Biography & Autobiography / Women. A single book can have up to three BISAC codes.
The book’s cover is considered part of its metadata because it is used in listings. Same with the author’s bio and any blurbs, reviews, or ratings you want to include.
The point of all this information is to impose order on the mass of books published each year and to help anyone who may be interested in a given title find it in the great sea of print.
Comparables are just what you’d expect: if you’re publishing a book, you need to identify a couple of similar books—comps—that position your book in the market. Some people in the business consider comparables to be part of metadata; others don’t because comps aren’t about categorization or discoverability so much as marketing. In my head, they’re part of metadata simply because they are another chore that has to be done along with preparing metadata.
Publishers are advised to choose comps that are recent, preferably from the last couple of years, and successful, but not outlandishly so if you want to maintain your credibility.
I initially had a hard time taking comps seriously, for all kinds of reasons. For starters, books aren’t comparable—even, as we saw above, when they’re written by the same author. If you’ve only a 50/50 chance of liking the next thing produced by Author A, whose previous work you’ve enjoyed, how low are the odds you’ll like something by Author B, just because some sales-hungry publisher has compared him to Author A? Author B may have very little in common with Author A—he’s probably never read him, and might not have heard of him.
How many books do you think have been comped to George Saunders and Jennifer Egan and Jonathan Franzen over the last twenty years? Probably thousands. I doubt any of them come close. Of course many books want to be comparable to works by those authors. Of course many want to appeal to the audiences of those authors. But they aren’t those authors, any more than the best Elvis imitator is the king of rock ‘n’ roll.
Isn’t the whole point of writing a book to produce something original? It is offensive to the spirit of the enterprise to reduce an author’s singular creation to a couple of misleading comparisons.
Other problems with comps: they work against anything that doesn’t fit into a neat category; they actively encourage imitation; they’re lazy and backward-looking. At their best, they’re a low-tech version of the algorithms that Amazon uses to filter and recommend books to you. How often does Amazon, with all its information about your search and purchasing habits, score on its recommendations? In my experience, never.
And yet comparables can’t be dismissed because many buyers on the retail side of the book business rely on them to guide their acquisitions.
I wrote last fall about how publishers present their books individually to sales teams in reductive five-minute pitches. What I didn’t mention was that after the publisher has pitched his books at five minutes per, the sales team goes out and makes its own still more truncated pitches to retailers who let comparables do a lot of heavy lifting in their decision-making.
This is not a criticism of the people involved in these processes. In my experience, they are well-intentioned, book-loving people. Some buyers are quite curious and conscientious—they’ll read everything you give them about forthcoming titles and even ask to see an advance readers copy if they’re considering a large order. But they nevertheless work in the massive, impersonal machinery of contemporary bookselling, all of which is designed to facilitate buying from catalogued metadata.
I’ve been told by salespeople that the bigger the retailer, the more likely it is to rely on comps. Some buyers apparently read the comps before they read the description of the book. If they don’t like the comps, they won’t get to the description. You might operate the same way if you had to buy thousands of books a season out of the hundreds of thousands on offer.
When I first figured out, as an author, that a book I’d laboured on for five years was going to be sold and (optimistically) bought on the basis of metadata and comparables, I felt queasy. That it later occurred to me I’d be lucky to have it bought on those terms, given that only a small minority of books published each year make it onto the shelves of book chains and independent bookstores, was no consolation.
It’s just as aggravating, as a publisher, to see books you care about reduced to a crude string of data and comparables, but that’s the fate of every title sold on Amazon, the websites of Walmart and retail bookselling chains, as well as some independents. You have to accept how the business works and master its processes as best you can.
“It’s Sun Tzu meets Marie Kondo: a strategic guide to winning life’s battles by decluttering your home and your soul.”
“It’s Pride and Prejudice meets The Hunger Games: Elizabeth Bennet must battle her sisters for the hand of Mr. Darcy—or die trying!”
“It’s Moby Dick meets Fifty Shades of Grey, an epic tale of obsession with a spicy twist!”
You get used to it, and try not to think about it too much.
New From Sutherland House
Keeping this week’s theme, Sutherland House is pleased to announce the publication of Kirsty Duncan’s The Exclusion Effect, a timely essay on how the sciences discourage girls and women, for readers of Melinda Gates’s The Moment of Lift, and Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women. You can order it right here or at your favourite bookstore.
Kirsty, as many of you will know, is member of Parliament for the riding of Etobicoke North and a former minister of science in the Trudeau government. She was the driving force for putting science front and centre in her government’s agenda.
From the book’s description:
As a newly minted Ph.D. in medical geography, Kirsty Duncan led an international expedition to remote Svalbard, Norway, to search for the cause of the deadly 1918 influenza. What should have been a rewarding intellectual adventure turned out to be an unwanted baptism into the unbridled sexism and privilege of the scientific community.
She has devoted herself to the support of girls and women in scientific endeavors ever since. While women have come a long way in science, there is still far to go. They remain under-represented, under-paid, under-published, and under the shadows of male scientists who are assumed, without evidence, to have innate capacities that women lack. Duncan identifies systemic biases in the assessment of girls’ abilities and the teaching of science in the home, the classroom, our communities, and professional life. She makes a powerful argument for cultural and institutional change to ensure girls and women their rightful place in the scientific community.
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