Unread Bestsellers: How to get people to read your book

There’s a huge number of words today. Consider this quote on the “unread bestseller”:

The “unread bestseller” has been remarked upon at least as far back as the Renaissance. In recent times, publishing watchers cite Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” and Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” as examples of the genre. But if book sales and length continue their trends, the incidence of the phenomenon can only grow.

Of course, what gets read is a hard thing to measure. Back in 1985, The New Republic sent members of its staff to visit Washington bookstores, where they placed coupons redeemable for cash within the pages of books including Strobe Talbott’s long “Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control,” then popular with the city’s power elite. Not one coupon came back.

So how do you get people to read your book? Do you even want them to?

I saw an eBook recently which was all about shortness. Compressing the most useful and interesting info into the fewest number of words possible. Is this the way we should be heading? I think people may not yet be realizing the value in brevity.