Why Is This Blog So Unpopular?

In case you hadn't noticed, nothing published on this blog "goes viral." Not remotely! No advertisers plead for space here to promote their products because the audience is so large and thus presumably commercially appealing.

Why is that?  Well, part of the answer might lie in a study Albert-László Barabási, who identifies himself as a data scientist, recently conducted in an attempt to discover what sort of books make the New York Times bestseller list.

He and a colleague analyzed the sales patterns of the 2,468 fiction and 2,025 non-fiction books that made the NYT hardcover bestseller lists over the past decade.

Well, this blog is nominally (and mostly) about fiction so let's start there.  What sells?  In a word, "action," or to put it another way, page-turners.  The top five best-selling categories are thrillers and suspense novels; mystery and detective stories; romance; fantasy, and science fiction.

I rarely write about books or stories that fall into one of those genres. There's nothing wrong with such books and possibly a great deal right about them. They are just not my thing.

I do stray away from fiction from time to time, mainly to write about political and social trends, and books concerned with history, law or political science are the second most popular genre on the non-fiction list. But biography, autobiography and memoir is by far the hottest selling category there, the two data scientists found.

So there you have it.  "Thoughts About Fiction" is one of the quieter backwaters of cyberspace, and rightly so!

When It Comes To What To Read, Are You a Sheep?

From time to time, I've told people that self-publishing a novel is one of the best ways to assure your anonymity in the ever-increasing surveillance society. Hardly anyone, it seems, makes their own decisions on what to read. Everyone wants to read what everyone else is already reading.

Further evidence of this all-too-human tendency -- essentially we are all sheep, hoping their is a leader around somewhere -- can be found in an article about declining book sales when best-seller lists are discontinued. It comes from an online publication called The Outline.