Posts Tagged ‘authors’
American Anthropoloh-gee
As an author, I am a reader. (I’m sure that’s no surprise). Like many readers I crawl through the bookstore trolling for . . . books! No, I’m not doing the Saturday night bookstore meat-market thing! It’s just about the books.
Though many of you do this, too (the books, not the hookups) how many of you have crunched the numbers? Yeah, I’m just that geeky . . . and sadly, my brain works in ways that I often don’t have to go looking for the numbers, a lot of them just pop out at me.
For example, in the fiction section, usually about 1/3 of the books are written by authors whose last name starts with A B or C. True. Check out your phone book . . . though the first half of the alphabet starts more first names (by about an order of 2!) compared to the second half, the last names are more evenly distributed. But not at the bookstore. This means that you Last-Namers with A-C names are far more likely to become authors than us end-of-the-alphabetters. Or – what I really suspect – is that writers and publishers are picking pen names that aim to put their books at beginning of the shelf. Of course, the irony here is that even ‘Carlton’ is now a good ways down the shelf.
Another thing that concerns me about bookstores is that this is where the future people will look to learn about us. They will find our books – or Kindles – and they will see what we read. Not so much because we read it, but because we found it important enough to document.
