https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midlist Just putting this here for future reference. Pay it no mind for now. Unless you’re an adult with questions, in which case I’ll do my best to answer them.
Is there an industry term for those "big name" authors (e.g., John Grisham, James Patterson, Sue Grafton etc.) whose books get heavily promoted and which almost always wind up on bestseller lists? Or are they simply called "bestselling authors?"
Before Steele and Crichton and Clancy died, there was an unofficial Big Six - King, Crichton, Clancy, Steele, Grisham, and Koontz. Now I suppose (don't read the Times Book Review anymore) Patterson and Grafton have moved up a notch, and maybe Rowling's been allowed into the club. My agent's retiring and not up on the current gossip. I should ask him, though.
This is not about you, but about the calculatedly stupid people who follow me around like rabid dogs. Relax.
If it's not a best seller, how can it be a "very popular title"? I don't know the distribution curve for book sales, but I imagine a small core of very high selling, profitable books; a very large middle ground of books that sell well enough to justify their production; and a small core of books that publishers "took a chance" on but that didn't sell and whose authors will have a tough time getting any future contracts. Is this not the case? And anyway, online publishing will put paid to the standard publishing paradigm before very much longer. When your production cost is very nearly zero and the author can upload their book without agent or whatnot, the old-school publishing houses are not long for the world.
As a function of the fact that so many of the larger publishers are now subsidiaries of movie/TV studios, a big factor in an editor's decision (probably has to be, if they want to keep their job) is "Can we get a media deal for this?" Cold Mountain is a classic example. Tedious novel becomes instant bestseller because, "Hey, we got us Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellwiger and Anthony Minghella's on board to direct it." This is what the marketing people did when they chatted up the big bookstore chains. So the buyers at B&N et al. were more or less obligated to preorder hundreds of thousands of copies and set up special displays. If, once the movie was released, they had to return most of those copies, the reading public wasn't aware of it. P.S., the author has written exactly two more novels in the intervening years. Don't know what he's been up to since. Guest lecturer on Civil War Studies at some snooty university, or just hangin' out in Margaritaville?
I'm not sure the kids today could eventually write something like that. "So I checked the ap and swiped right, and there she was. We texted for an hour - and then she deleted her account."
Hrm... That wouldn't work either because technology changes too much. The author would end up having to explain what iPhones and Tinder were and how they were used, and a later writer would undoubtedly botch it, kind of like a modern college student writing about a Commodore 64. You could see some of that in the Craigslist piece about the B-52, which is fictional.
On a not-unrelated note, I'm in the process of (very slowly) converting some of my earlier works from print to OCR (it might almost be faster to retype them), and it's funny to see how alien some of the terminology from the 1970s is. "Person-to-person" long-distance calling? I had to remind myself what that was. Wowsers!
We've been discussing this on a local Boston board, and there are some problems with the narrative. For example, he describes eating at a department store lunch counter, yet the named store didn't have one. Well, maybe he confused the names after 40 plus years, but 12/31/72 was a Sunday and blue laws were still in effect, etc. It's well written, but is also very likely a work of fiction.
In the latest Superman movie they didn't even try a phone booth gag. At some point Doctor Who's Tardis is going to have to convert to a porta-john.
Fiction. Neither the B-52D or G models would have dropped 48 bombs (the D's were dropping 108 bombs per mission over Hanoi). He definitely wouldn't have dropped only 48 bombs over four missions, and it's extremely unlikely that he could have flown 4 missions over 11 days. He also wouldn't have smelled smoke unless his plane was on fire. He wouldn't have been sent home in the middle of the Linebacker campaign, which didn't end until some months later, and even if he was, there's is absolutely no way to go from flying missions to being a civilian back home in a week or two. The Air Force just didn't do that. And very few bomber pilots had any problems with dropping bombs on people. One B-52 pilot I talked to said he just concentrated on keeping his gyros absolutely aligned, flying dead straight and level for one minute prior to release while SAMs the size of telephone poles were flying up past him. He told me he could've dodged a little bit but that would throw his track off and then somebody else would have to come back and hit the target because he missed it, and he did not want to cause that. And most people don't go for a walk after drinking an entire fifth of whisky, which I assume had to be George Dickel because Jack Daniel's didn't make a rye back then.
Yep, some of those issues were also raised in the other discussion. I just figured nobody here would know the Boston specific inaccuracies.
