Re: Friday and Job vs the Brain Eater

On Aug 18, 6:25�pm, acwhe...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Andrew Wheeler) wrote:
Bill Patterson <WHPatter...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Aug 17, 5:17?pm, acwhe...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Andrew Wheeler) wrote:
Bill Patterson <WHPatter...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<massive SNIP>

Heinlein was clearly aware that his readership, just on the
numbers, was not sophisticated in SF concepts; at a time when the
entire SF-reading market was between 20,000 and 50,000, his new books
could count on 1.5-2 million sales between hardcover release and
intial mmpb sales: ?he was essentially doing the same thing after 1980
that he had done with the Post stories in 1947

This is a *vast* underestimate of the SF readership of the time.
Lawrence Watt-Evans recently posted (in another thread) some details of
sales of the day:
<http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/browse_thread/thre...
b32b36eb2df348b>.

Given that genre mass-market books could routinely sell 100,000 copies
-- and clearly, by that point, it wasn't the same people buying every
single book, the core SF audience was several times that size. I'd say
the number of people who regularly bought SF books, and thought of
themselves as at least intermittent SF readers, was about half a
million.

Given how separated by genre the book business was then, I also think it
would be a mistake to assume the rest of Heinlein's readership was some
sort of generall bestseller audience, the kind of readers who read
Arthur Hailey one week and Rosamunde Pilcher the next. It's far more
likely that the vast majority of those readers were men (and some women)
in their middle years -- thirties and forties -- who had read more SF in
their younger days but were mostly too busy, or too grown-up for it
then. So Heinlein would be a vestige of a previous reading pattern, not
a sign of new readers.

(This is the traditional bestseller SFF pattern, up until very recently
-- the bestsellers capture nearly all of the hard-core readers in the
genre, and a large proportion of the casual, few-books-a-year readers as
well.)

Heinlein might have thought that the bulk of his '80s readers were new
to him, but it's very unlikely that was actually true.

--
Andrew Wheeler

I'm having trouble making a consistent picture out of the various sets
of numbers we've got here. �Yes, clearly you're right particularly
about MMPB sales in the 1980's. �I think I was misdating/
misremembering statistics that really belonged to the early '60's.

However, I seriously doubt that the bulk of sales for the last five
books in both hardcover and initial paperback issues for first year of
release -- which I understand from the old royalty reports ran between
1.5 and 2 million copies -- comes from old-habitual Heinlein readers.
That would be a "Zebra" worth explaining in its own right.
Furthermore, I wouldn't expect a market-conscious writer to say to
himself "I'm selling mostly to old readers therefore I've got to find
new writing experiments to make." �Heinlein simply doesn't act like a
writer who's depending on residual purchases by comfortable old-shoe
readers.

I suspect there's a middle here where the truth may be lurking. �But
in any case I think not only did Heinlein believe, for whatever
reasons of input he got, that he was reaching new readers, but that he
actually was. �Of course, other writers were reaching new readers, too
-- the readership of SF was expanding. �The difference in sales
between Octavia Estelle Butler's pattern novels and the later
xoogenesis trilogy. for instance, I think can almost entirely be
accounted for by special-interest readers plus fresh blood in the SF
reading markets.

But Heinlein wasn't the only writer of his generation selling at a new,
higher level in hardcover -- Asimov, Clarke, Herbert (for Dune novels),
and to a lesser extent Pohl and Bradbury were also selling much better.
Some of them were selling *vastly* better -- the new Dune books were as
strong bestsellers as any of Heinlein's novels. As were Asimov's late
Foundation and Robot novels. As, oddly as it seems thirty years later,
was Chip Delany's _Dhalgren_. A lot of SF by big names was selling very
well in hardcover from the late seventies through the early nineties.

Either one postulates a brand new audience for SF, entering the field
post-_Star Wars_ (which is probably partially true, but, if these are
all new readers, why are they reading all of the late-series books of
old writers? that doesn't fit the behavior of other newcomers to a genre
before or since), or one realizes that all of these writers started
selling strongly in hardcover at the same time that the chain bookstores
made books in hardcover easily available to millions of Americans for
the first time and the Baby Boomers entered the best-paid phases of
their careers.

My theory, which would be difficult to prove, is that a lot of Boomers
-- born in the '40s and so in their thirties during the '70s -- stopped
reading SF regularly when they "grew up" a decade before, but came back
to the writers they remembered (and some newcomers, like William Gibson)
as the _Star Wars_ movies and attendant media attention made SF look
like more of a grown-up activity, and not something they had to be
ashamed of. So there would be a large number of people who hadn't been
buying SF in hardcover -- and possibly not buying SF at all -- a few
years before, but who were also not exactly "new" readers.

Also, from what I know of Heinlein, I suspect that, by the 1970s, he was
mostly getting told what he wanted to hear. (I mean by his agent, his
editor, and anyone else connected with his publishing house.) It's a
very common pattern with older writers, particularly those who sell well
and are curmudgeonly by nature. Who he *thought* he was selling to might
not bear any real resemblance to his actual audience -- and he'd taken
strong steps not to meet his audience by that point, as well.

--
Andrew Wheeler- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

True, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. These
hypothetical new readers were not just reading the old-line classics
-- they did support a renaissance of reprints, but they were also
supporting the new wave of mass market technothrillers, things like
The Prometheus Crisis, as well as the Niven and Pournelle mass market
collaborations -- and they were also the same group who was making sf-
based movies the studio-saving institutions they were to become.

As to being told what he wanted to hear -- possibly; it's not a truth
that jumps out at me from the correspondence. I do note an increasing
lack of editing among his editors after about 1982 or so. Not so much
during the 1970's -- his fiction editors/publishers had long-
established working relationships by that time which seem to have
proceeded pretty much as they had during the 1960's, except that he
had become more able to anticipate the editors' reactions as he knew
them better, so there much the same kind of back-and-forth, but less
of it. Example: before he became ill, Heinlein was tellling his
editor at Putnam's he wanted to cut an additional 25,000 words out of
IWFNE and it's difficult to tell what was in the mix. Part of his
intention is doubtless due to his sense of where the book should be
based on editorial interaction over the last 10 years or so; part of
it was doubtless also attributable to the needs of the story per se,
since there are some repetitions left in that are good candidates for
that drastic a cut. And the editorial interaction with the EB editors
was voluminous and highly affected the end product. So, the 70's not
so much.

I realize I'm addressing, as well as what you have to say in this
post, arguments I've heard before on the subject of Heinlein and
editors. I do think there's also a natural feedback loop going on (or
not going on) with his fiction editors after 1980, in addition to the
other factors: a commercial writer who won't revise except to
editorial demand gets no editorial demand, so . . .
.

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