One of those
questions that you get asked pretty regularly as a writer is... what do you
read? The short answer is not as much as I’d like these days, while the
slightly longer answer is the same stuff that I write. I’ve always been a big
thriller reader, ever since I discovered that there were James Bond books as
well as movies...
I’ve just finished
Never Go Back, the latest but one of the Jack Reacher series from Lee Child,
one of the top thriller writers of this generation. There are now 19 of these
books, one a year from when he started. While Child maintains a very even level
of quality in the books that I have read, I have to say that this wasn’t the
strongest ending I’ve ever seen.
In fact, it was
pretty feeble – I’m not going to spoil it for you, but it led me to start
thinking… what is it about writers that people keep going back to them even
when they have just delivered a bad book? Not that Never Go Back is a bad book,
it’s just a poor ending – but I’m already cue-ing up the new one, regardless of
my disappointment. Never Go Back is prophetic, I will, even if I shouldn't...
It’s simply not
true to say that you are only as good as your last book.
I think the
willingness to stay with an author has something to do with the amount of time
we invest in a book. If a movie’s rubbish, it’s a couple of hours you aren’t
going to get back. If a book’s rubbish, or has a disappointing ending, it’s the
best part of a day that we’ve wasted.
Now – if we take
into account that the vast majority of readers only read a couple of books a
year – we start to see why they are so conservative. If you were only going to
have two cups of coffee in 2015, you’d make damn sure that they were good ones.
It’s not surprising
that breaking down this conservativeness in book selection is nigh on impossible.
The only chink is to appeal to the much smaller proportion of people who read a
lot – they are the only ones who will take a risk on the new. And to do that, I’m
starting to think that you really have to write for a niche. And then market
hard to that niche. Everyone else just wants to read the same stuff as everyone
else. Bad endings or not.