Fear etc. on Literature & Marketing

I was at the Great Writing conference recently.  One of the speakers used Harry Potter as a case study and referred to it as 'literature' - but then noted that by literature they meant simply something like a written fictional text.

This got me thinking.

There is an equivalent, perhaps far greater, recent literary phenomenon that Harry Potter.  I am referring of course to the literary phenomenon of Fifty Shades of Grey.

>From the same source:

1) Fifty Shades of Grey is the fastest selling paperback of all time

2) Copies sold:  Harry Potter - 450m over 7 titles over 16 years (1997-2013)= 65m per title/ 29m per year;  Fifty Shades of Grey 100m over 3 titles over 2 years (2011-2013)= 34m per title/ 50m per year.  More copies of Fifty Shades were sold in the UK than the entire Harry Potter series combined.

3) Quality of prose, story, etc. - probably not much to choose between them...

However, we need to consider what would be the case if we equalized/weighted the two titles.  If Harry Potter had only been three titles how many would it have sold and if Fifty Shades of Grey had been seven titles over the same number of years as Harry Potter how many would it have sold.  Given that Fifty Shades of Grey is the fastest selling paperback of all time we can reckon that it could have outstripped Harry Potter had it been released over a similarly long time frame.

Furthermore, the film had yet to be released by the time Fifty Shades had sold 100m copies and it had only been available for c. 2 years.  The first Harry Potter book was released in 1997 and major films have been made of all the books.

In addition, the size of the markets is very different.  The Harry Potter market is extremely large as it is a 'family market', whereas the Fifty Shades market is self-limiting.  Not only that, Fifty Shades originated in an even smaller, thought substantive, sub-market.

Overall I suggest that if this weighting is taken into account Fifty Shades is the more extraordinary literary phenomenon.

I suggest that neither of these is a literary phenomenon.  They are both extraordinary examples of marketing phenomenon where the actual marketing is obscured and obfuscated and the public are led to believe that the titles are a literary phenomenon, which is yet another marketing technique.  I further suggest that the interesting thing about both is the nature of the marketing and how much effort was expended to disguise the marketing methods and the extraordinary success of that marketing.  In addition, the marketing techniques used were 'one offs'.  That is, having been used once they cannot again be used to the same extent because everybody now knows the techniques.



Dr William J Fear (ChPsychol) MCIPD


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While I think that marketing and other commercial factors should not be discounted in the success of these or any other cultural products, I think that it may be mistaken to reduce their success to materialist factors. I have not, and have no intention of reading the Shades of Gray book and know very little about them, however, certainly with regard to Harry Potter, JK Rowling succeeded in striking a chord that resonated deeply with the Zeitgeist (what ever that may be) of the 90's and 00's. The books tapped  and stoked some deep need and desire among children and adults for fantasy literature of a certain type during that period. This does not necessarily mean that the HP books are great literature by the standards of traditional literary critics and scholars, but I do not think that they are merely uninspired drivel foisted on us through the manipulations of the gods of global capitalism.

On the other hand, do not even the greatest books, going back to the Bible and Homer, owe their status to a certain extent to the exigencies of what we might consider "market forces"? Can we really separate these factors out from pure literary considerations? 

(Moshe Shoshan)

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Good question
Equally, Fifty Shades clearly succeeded in striking a chord that resonated deeply with the
Zeitgeist (what ever that may be) of the 00's. The books tapped
 and stoked some deep need and desire among young adults and adults for fantasy

literature of a certain type during that period.

Dr William J Fear (ChPsychol) MCIPD

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While I’m no classicist, I’ve gathered enough about “Homer” (whatever that name applies to as an actual “author”) to understand that the Iliad and Odyssey originated as oral performances passed down from one generation to another until someone (Homer?) actually wrote them down.  As such, they had value not only as entertainment (and perhaps a form of “oral history”), but played very important roles in pre-Christian Greek religion, serving in part to focus “Greek” identity among a set of widely scattered city-states and colonies through such stories of the hero-demigods. (See Gregory Nagy’s The Greek Hero in 24 Hours, based on his Harvard class and MOOC.)  Pericles, who had close associations with Athenian theatre, apparently used these epics and the plays of his era as a way of cultivating Athenian identity (and hegemony).  So, yes, in a sense, “marketing” for socio-political reasons was apparently part of the reason for these works’ original popularity and elevated status.  Later, what survived of these texts became models for writers, thus incorporated as part of a canon of works that also helped to focus (Roman, British, American, etc.) culture.  The very word “canon” of course evokes the Hebrew Bible and New Testament as texts that also conferred cultural norms within the context of socio-political associations once their disparate parts were assembled and blessed by the (rabbinical or clerical-imperial) powers that were.  So, Numbers and Chronicles, not to mention Homer’s catalogue of ships and instructions on how to drive in a chariot race during a funeral game, become incorporated as part of that cultural and “literary” heritage (which itself has ebbed and flowed over time).

I remember the first time in my teens when on my own I walked into a bookstore with pretensions (Brentano’s) and was amazed at the diverse category labels on the shelves.  Some were familiar genre names (“Mysteries,” “Science Fiction”) but I was puzzled to see that “Literature” and “Fiction” were two different sections of the store.  Surely the latter was a subset of the former, I thought, but apparently not.  There was a value judgment implicit in such marketing that has many interesting cultural byways.  A quick glance at the historical citations for the different definitions of “Literature” in the Oxford English Dictionary are fascinating in their own right, but among “genre” writers the contest between “literary value” and niche marketing remains a sore point even today.  “Science fiction” writers, for example, may protest what they see as slumming in their field by “literary” authors such as Margaret Atwood or Doris Lessing and resent the apostasy of Kurt Vonnegut for rejecting the “SF” label.  Terry Eagleton noted the problem in his chapter “What Is Literature?” in Literary Theory: “Seventeenth-century English literature includes Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan's spiritual autobiography and whatever it was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote. . . . Nineteenth-century English literature usually includes Lamb (though not Bentham), Macaulay (but not Marx), Mill (but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer).”

That The Norton Anthology of American Literature (among others) now includes essays, memoirs and “oral literature”—not to mention a graphic novel like Maus-- that once would have had no place in such a tome testifies how much things have changed since Eagleton’s text helped to define the terms of the late 20^th-century “culture wars.”  But textbook publishers also ignore their markets at their peril.

Don Larsson

 

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Pearl Buck won the Nobel Prize for literature. Neither James Joyce nor Virginia Woolf did. Maybe I'm missing something by not taking the Nobel committee as my arbiter, but I doubt it. (Henry Kissinger won a Nobel Peace prize. Yeah, I know it's a different committee. Still, the mind boggles.)

The point here is this: the claim, which I believe was made, that "The Old Man and the Sea" achieved success without marketing is demonstrably false. Hemingway marketed himself tirelessly and successfully and he had plenty of help. We may differ in our assessments of the book. I think it's pretty trivial, not even close to, for example, the Nick Adams stories; you don't. Fine. But don't pretend that it didn't benefit from a concerted sales effort.

And the further point is this: the claim that there is or can be a discussion of "literature" as a category that transcends the material and economic circumstances of the enterprise's existence is wrong.

I can't judge 50 Shades. I haven't read it. I have my suspicions, but I generally don't pass judgement without reading a text. Mostly I don't care about it. I do, however, care about the rigourous study of narrative. The categories in play here are, in my view, pretty devoid of rigour.

I'm pretty sure that "marketing vs literature" here is a prime example of the kind of hierarchical binary that we should deconstruct.

Peace. I'm out,
Pat

Pat Dolan
 

(This is the beginning of an interesting thread in the Narrative-L)