Pageturner Novel? Rarer Than A Needle In A Haystack

There are over 1 million new books published every year, just in the United States alone. Sounds a lot right? Well it's a staggering amount actually. You don't see that many movies or music records being released. So why are there so many books? More importantly why are there so few genuine pageturners? By addressing the first question, we can answer both.

Every literate "Joe" with some basic discipline can bang out a book and self publish. There are pros and some serious cons to this. The pros are that new talent can breakthrough into the industry and publish their work with ease, bypassing the Berlin Wall of traditional publishing. Often the most genuine, unique and raw form of writing comes from indie authors. The characterization and plot may not be a mind boggle like the Stephen King books, but hey, reading is about enjoyment and these authors deliver the goods. You can survey many readers and they will tell you that Stephen King books are not the holy grail of enjoyment. Many lose concentration from the over detailed emotional responses of the characters, that are often, just borderline bizarre. We live in a fast world, it's all about consumption and moving on. Reading should be no different. Who has the concentration span right? How often do you hear, "Well I'm more of a movie buff"? The answer to those people is that they just haven't read the right book. A read that has caught their attention without comprising on concentration. 

Now the cons, since every literate Joe can self publish there is too much content available. Undoubtedly a lot of it, if not most, is pretty poor quality. Secondly, a lot of the review websites and ratings systems are not completely unbiased as the world would hope. With more than 1 million copies to sift through, how do you find the gems, the real "read the whole night" pageturners? The answer is you don't.

Answering our original questions:

So why are there so many books? Thanks to amazon KDP every regular Joe can publish a book.

More importantly why are there so few genuine pageturners? With over 1 milllion copies published and unreliable biased review websites and rating systems, it's on the verge of impossible to find the true gems. Also there is talk of  knowing how work the Amazon algorithm.(I will discuss that in a different article). Not all bestseller's are pageturners, I'm sure that you have realised that by now. They sell because there is something called "HYPE" generated by excellent marketing. Generally, they are not bad reads, but they are not amazing ones either.

I'm always looking for my next pageturner, but who know's maybe I got the same chance at winning the lotto.

Thanks for reading today.