Flipping the bird at answers

I’ve been reading about marketing recently, because I joined the committee of Wet Ink magazine as Marketing Dude, and understanding what marketing means does not come as naturally to me as understanding how to edit a manuscript does.

This seems to be a common sentiment in the small-press sector: there is an immense amount of production talent – well-read, judicious editors, tweaked and beautiful designers, typography wonks and typesetting nerds whose idea of a hilarious joke is that keming is bad kerning – but most of the people I know in this field spend as much of their time producing as they do commiserating about their poor sales.

The problem with most of us progressive, literary types is that we’re educated enough to be critically minded about marketing and advertising, so we find it difficult to employ these dirty means to sell our own work, or that of the writers we publish. As though literature were some sort of sacrosanct product – something that could, or should, exist outside of the market in which we trade everything else.

Yes, a lot of the marketing literature out there is riddled with impenetrable corporatese, and the prospect of beginning to use this language makes me feel illogically duplicitous, but buried in that corporatese are perfectly reasonable phrases like ‘identifying your market’, ‘putting your product in the way of your market’ and ‘delivering value to your customers‘.

If you produce literature, why wouldn’t you want to do these things? Marketing is only a dirty word in some literary circles because it has been appropriated by unscrupulous companies to deliver products of dubious value to customers whose faculties of scrutiny are less than sharp. It’s not just anti-ageing cream that gets this treatment – someone, maybe Albert Camus, said that abstract art is ‘a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered’.

It might also be that marketing doesn’t fit well in the literary sector because no one can really explain what the value of literature is: you either get it and you read a lot, or you don’t and you’re not sure what all the fuss is about. Next time you meet someone who says they don’t get reading, try explaining to them that regular engagement with literature develops your compassionate motives by facilitating your understanding of other people’s experience of the human condition.

Yet, Coca Cola manage to convince millions of consumers every day that they should buy their sugary, carbonated tooth corroder. Coke has no value, but look how fun it is to drink – you get to float around in one of those bubbles!

So, what are the values of literature? One way to begin answering the question of how to market literature is to start thinking about why you read literature. Chances are, many others read literature for similar reasons, and you can derive a loosely representative sample from this.

I read literature for private communion with the ideas of others, and I write it to offer the same. This communion improves my understanding of others, which improves my personal relationships. Through literature I learn about perspectives on the world I could never have dreamed up myself, simply because I have not lived the same experiences as the writer. So my world view shifts almost imperceptibly through reading literature, and this empowers me to lead a more ethical, productive and compassionate existence.

Why do you read literature? What value does it contribute to your life?