Visibility

When I was at school, which is some time ago now, there were only a few bands you could listen to. I would say that all the bands that anyone listened to - that were on the radio, that were in your record store, that your friends, and even your enemies listened to or went to see was less than 200.

That included every genre, every style. So, amongst those 200 some got to be very big. They had all the focus and all the visibility.

But what happens now is that there are thousands if not tens of thousands of bands. Some of them are pretty good. You'd really like some of them a lot, if you could only find them. The music industry is now fragmented and diffuse. There are some big names up there still of course which have huge marketing machines behind them, but increasingly good musicians are playing to smaller audiences.

It strikes me that the same thing is happening with authors. There are hundreds and thousands of authors publishing their books and ebooks now.  Most of those are never ever going to be professionally reviewed. Unless they break out and sell millions like John Locke or Amanda Hocking that is.

So, even if you have a good book, you are going to struggle to be visible. And by the old statistical bell curve of normal distribution, some books are going to suck, a lot of books are going to be ok, and some books are going to be brilliant. But how to tell?

John Locke says that his books are ok. I read one recently and it was absolutely that in my humble opinion. I'm not saying I can write better - I certainly can't sell better.

But we like to think that our work would succeed on merit - that if it was a wonderful piece of writing then it would rise to the top of the pile.

There are two questions I have here:

1) Would it though? Even if wonderful, does the huge ocean of other books drown it out?
2) Is our writing really that good? It might be ok, but the critical acclaim (I'm not talking about 2-3 positive reviews) is still not there. Maybe because it just moderately blows. And even if it doesn't blow, maybe it just doesn't shine.

Only time will tell (this is my favourite saying at the moment).