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AE: It really better be good if your going to tear them away from the television.
BH: Exactly, but with books, we don’t need to appeal to every single person in America the way that TV shows do. If we can satisfy .0001% of the population, we still sell 25,000 copies, which is a huge, huge success. And so we have the luxury to really speak to individual souls.
MJ: There is also this idea that writing literary fiction is smarter, that you’re smarter if to read it, you’re smarter if you write it. Frankly, I find a lot of literary fiction to be poorly written indulgence. I think to write a good genre book--I mean to really get your readers drawn in with a good idea, keep the story moving along, and have good characters--I think that’s harder to do than to write a literary book where the main character just wanders around the house remembering stories from their past.
BH: I just read a quote that said 90 percent of everything is crap. 90 percent of literary fiction is crap, 90 percent of science fiction is crap...You told me that?
MJ: Yeah! I can't remember who.....Wait! I know who it was, it was Michael Chabon, he was an NPR talking about his new book. People were like, "Do you think you are stepping down from literary fiction to genre fiction?" He said "Look, ninety percent of everything is crap. Ninety percent of literary fiction I pick up is crap, ninety percent of mysteries I pick up are crap, ninety percent of everything is crap, and ten percent of it all is good." This idea that literary fiction is the ideal because it is always going to be better, he is trying to bring us back from that way of thinking.
BH: I don't know where these snobs are, because every single writer I know, regardless of the genre they write in--they don't judge any other writer who's making a living, who's writing what they need to write to make a living. Everybody understands how hard it is to make a living in this business and they don't judge other people.
MJ: Editors more than anybody else in the world appreciate the beauty of sales, they do care about words, but they also care a lot about sales.
BH: I don't think it is the editors, I think it's the people reviewing this sort of stuff. There is something very pure about book sales. That this many people like this book enough to buy to buy it. That is very profound to me.

AE: But how much are book sales effected by marketing?
BH: You cannot sell horse manure to a horse. People are not going to buy a book they don't want to read. They put lavish marking campaigns behind bad books, and the books do not move.

AE: Are there a lot of good books that never really see the light of day because they don’t have good marketing campaigns?
MJ: Yes, we wonder that.
BH: I think books, unlike TV and movies, are not driven by publicity, but by word of mouth. I still feel really optimistic about that, that if you write a book that most people want and you work your butt off to get the word out about it, your book will be a success. You can still do it. When we don't get very much media and we have no ad budgets, all we have is people who like reading a book and recommend it to their friends, but that is so powerful. Promoting my books now for the last two years, I hear from a lot of people who have a megaphone--whether its a media outlet, or a book club or something--and they can sell hundreds of copies. Its much more grass roots, much more organic than TV or movies, which rely heavily on debuts or the opening weekend.

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