In an early April issue of Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King published an article entitled, "How To Bury a Book." His subject was a book called Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski. King asserts that it is a "Russian doll of a novel, filled with stories within stories." At the time his article was published, Fieldwork was hovering at 24,571 on the Amazon bestseller list, the victim of an ambiguous cover and a bad job of marketing by its publisher. King asks, "Why, why, why would a company publish a book this good and then practically demand that people not read it?"
As of today, it's at 6,220, thanks, in no small part I'm sure, to King's endorsement. But why does it take Stephen King and a magazing like Entertainment Weekly to put a good book in the hands of the discerning and intelligent reader? How many other quality books are floundering out there for lack of a method of marketing to the reading public? Meanwhile, anything with a stiletto heel shoe or a stylish woman pushing a pram on the cover gets forcefed to the public by appearing front and center at the bookstores and getting a media blitzkrieg that moves books faster than they can be published.
Are publishing companies so certain that the book-buying public is incapable of "getting" quality fiction that they continually push the direct-to-paperback twaddle down our throats? Is this trend going to push fine writers out of the business of creating compelling stories and character studies in favor of formulaic insta-best sellers?
While we ponder these questions, I guess Mischa Berlinski is basking in the glow of success after Stephen King's endorsement...but King can only read and write about so many books. So what do the rest of the authors do? And what do we readers do?
Di
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