A Zoom confab yesterday with Jessica Powers of Catalyst Press – soon to be handling the distribution and marketing of my books internationally – saw a group of writers discussing the thorny issue of the author as ‘product’. I think we were impressed by her sound arguments regarding the advantages of building connections with our readers as, perhaps, a cohort of somewhat older creatives not generally invested in a daily commitment to posting personal reflections and information about ourselves on social media.

But if we accept the need to connect with a readership (and I DO understand this, although as an ambivert, I am not a natural sharer), then who is it that we are reaching out to? And are they actually going to seek out, advocate for, and purchase, our work?

While it’s certainly true that I have met and built friendships with a lively group of young Namibians – some of them budding authors themselves – through personal appearances and engagement in local media, I would struggle to identify a typical purchaser of my books. Indeed, it would be easier to say who hasn’t bought my work, or read it online…

I have now inventoried almost 10,000 donated books through my work with the Promising Pages Pilot Initiative, mostly handed over by middle-class, middle-aged professionals and (trying hard not to be snarky here!) I am genuinely shocked at the choices highly educated people have obviously made with regard to spending significant amounts of money at the bookstore (which is what it amounts to here, since it’s almost impossible to purchase books cheaply or successfully online).

It seems as if nonliterary fiction (‘beach reads’, ‘airport novels’, ‘chick-lit’, ‘bonkbusters’ – pick your judgy descriptor) are overwhelmingly favoured against more heavyweight material, or the classics/prize-winners. Indeed, more than a few friends have ruefully confessed that they were unlikely ever to read my work as they prefer stuff that’s unchallenging and lightweight. (Yes, they are still my friends. And no, ‘A Bed on Bricks‘ hardly competes with ‘Ulysses’ for formal inventiveness!)

So on the one hand, while we are told that the market for serious/highbrow literature is alive and well, albeit that books are being accessed through a multitude of digital platforms nowadays (some of them free), the very people whom I used to picture as the obvious target readership for my books (and those of authors like me) are openly admitting that they really do prefer an ‘easy read’: something shallow and instantly forgettable, in their own words.

It’s hard, as an author who agonizes over every turn of phrase, not be discouraged – in the interests of research I have attempted to read a few of these preferred books and just came away from the experience perplexed. (I even puzzled over the love given to Sally Rooney’s best-seller ‘Normal People’. I just didn’t understand the fuss and thought it committed the cardinal sin or being a dull book about dull people. There, I said it!). They are the literary equivalent of easily-digested junk food – not even that, as there’s barely even a modicum of sustenance to be had from their consumption.

Is it possible to say that there’s still a healthy appetite for high-quality literature when the evidence, to my eyes at least, manifestly contradicts this?

Exhibit A: I was trying to choose a children’s book recently on Amazon, to send to a relative in Europe. Their algorithm directed me, over and over, to self-published, generic, didactic, message-driven slop comprising a handful of repetitious pages (yes, I am sure many were AI products) with tasteless clip-art illustrations and stereotypical characterisations, boosted by ‘reviews’ that must have generated by bots or written by supportive family-and-friends of the authors (I use the term loosely). Yet people are evidently buying this stuff (because it’s cheap?) over the time-honoured, memorable classics.

Where did the general readership’s powers of discernment go? Because people who do still buy and read or listen to books are, surely, individuals wielding some degree of discrimination? I am genuinely, objectively curious. Also, why are my social-media feeds polluted with memes and videos of AI-generated, meretricious fakery, selected by people who are willfully blind to the costs – to real-life human creatives whose work has been stolen without payment or attribution, as well as to the environment? Is this the future? Should we give up striving (for months, years…) to craft original, thought-provoking, attention-grabbing books, music, images, plays etc. and concede defeat to machine-regurgitated, plagiarised pap or the blandest of undemanding products because consumers quite literally seem to prefer them?

Exhibit B: I recently attended an event at our national library for a ‘meet the author’ session. Everybody else in that room with me had self-published their work, or were looking to. They had either suffered too many rejections from traditional publishing houses, or were not even willing to submit themselves to the indignities of that time-consuming, mortifying process. Yet this choice to pay to print their own books, or the decision to use a profit-driven vanity publisher, will inevitably result in an inferior product that’s a poor reflection of the artist’s creativity. It takes a sizeable crowd of professionals and therefore significant financial investment for a company to publish a book (I think 7 people were involved in my forthcoming release, ‘The Limbo Circus‘) and this must be why many legacy publishing houses now support a lucrative self-publishing imprint, or are reduced to churning out celebrity-authored fiction and non-fiction that guarantees sales through its popular appeal.

Why am I asking if F. Scott Fitzgerald was correct? Because he held that it’s possible to retain two conflicting views in mind (indeed it is the sign of a ‘first-rate intelligence’, according to him). While my IQ may be up for debate, I do believe that a.) culture is under threat from glib mediocrity as never before, yet b.) I simultaneously remain hopeful that artworks reflecting originality, beauty, challenging material, alternative voices, and creations of subtlety and complexity could and should prevail. But if people don’t step up and choose them/consume them/buy them over the cheaply manufactured, uninspiring alternatives, then why should the film industry, publishers, music companies, TV producers etc. opt to continue to put money into supporting risky human creativity when its products sink without trace, unable to compete in the marketplace?

A conversation this week with someone who reads a lot of historical fiction (a genre I very rarely explore) said that on the Facebook group of which she is a member, people were articulating that with the world on a seeming knife-edge (is it really? Or do progressives’ algorithms just make it feel that way?) they simply could not face cerebral, disturbing, or complex narratives. They were pivoting to material that required no psychic heavy lifting of them; when they picked up a book these days, it was with the intention of ‘switching off’ from the world and its problems. I note a similar phenomenon, actually, when I watch TV (although, again, my algorithm chooses suggestions for me to stream). There’s a definite uptick in the type of light entertainment that has often been sneered at in the past as ‘low culture’: slapstick, farce and very broad comedy seem to be making a comeback, and receiving critical acclaim also. Maybe we really do want to return to simpler times: how we choose to spend our downtime right now is a reflection of our limited willingness to peer into the abyss.

This is my first real effort at trying to make that all-important connection with people who may wish to explore my work as an author. I post with a great deal of trepidation, knowing that I may well be opening myself up to accusations of intellectual snobbery (although I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, part of the intelligentsia). That my prejudices may be exposed as being self-righteous, narrow-minded and censorious. Fair enough, actually. Inviting harsh criticism is a risk that anybody out there in social-media land takes; the reason I have not been keen to re-enter the fray is the very nasty ad hominem attacks I was subjected to when I wrote a regular column for our national newspaper some time ago. Even back them, almost 10 years ago, the trolls were out in force and although I have a thick skin, it’s hard not to rise to the bait when the offensive onslaught becomes too toxic to ignore.

And so, even if you are not tempted to dip into my books, or have done so and found them less than earth-shatteringly great, I hope you will give some thought to the questions I raise here occasionally. And let me know what you think… (Oh, and what am I reading right now? ‘Madame Bovary’ (in translation). And I am loving it.)