

Must Every YA Action Heroine Be Petite? - wozniacki
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/must-every-ya-action-heroine-be-petite/284568/

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moron4hire
Go check out the Kindle Store. Look in the sci-fi category. There are over
67500 titles, 2500 of them having been released in the last month!

Sort by price: lowest first. 75 pages, over a thousand books--just in the sci-
fi category--listed for $0. Incidentally, Amazon doesn't let you go past the
400th page. An addition 5000 books listed at the minimum Kindle Store price of
$0.99.

Poorly Photoshopped covers. Absurd titles, splitting into fractals of
subtitles, "series" this, "saga" that. I picked 10 at random, the page-length
estimates average out to be about 50 "printed pages"; one in particular was
only 12 pages.

Download a try reading a few of them. 50 pages is 50 too many. Now read the
reviews. Glowing expositions of "couldn't put it down until I finished it in
one sitting". No shit! I should hope you could read 50 pages in one sitting.

In contrast, I packed up my poorly-maintained blog into a Word document and it
was 150 pages for the last three years. With no change in my writing habits, I
could be releasing a Kindle Book every year.

Now, swap the sort: go highest to lowest. THIRTEEN books listed at $200. That
little bit of absurdity aside, the general fare isn't much better than the
bottom of the price list. A few notable exceptions, but on the whole, it's
clear people will probably prefer to take their chances on a $1 book that will
probably suck than a $30 book that will probably suck. On the 400th page, all
of the titles are $3.99. They average around 250 pages, but there are still
some 50 page titles in the mix.

As far as the average consumer is concerned, books are a plentiful commodity.
EBooks opened the door to allow anyone to publish. And then everyone _did_.

But even scarier, the readers bought in. Readers love their niche categories,
and will consume anything in it. Is it any surprise that serious authors--
looking to make a living, who also have the barest modicum of writing skill
that can set them completely apart from the massive piles of garbage in the
market--will optimize for what readers want?

