Storytellersunplugged

by Kealan Patrick Burke

Writers promote because we have to, particularly in the small press where the budgets don’t exist to rent the sides of buses or billboards on LA freeways, or center spreads in People. This promotion–as discussed in other essays here on Storytellers Unplugged–takes many forms. The Internet, for example, is an important window through which writers can shout about their wares. Message boards, Blogger.com, LiveJournal, various book sites, e-zines, are all handy auditoriums for the writer. During my exploration and reader-gathering at one of these sites, however, I discovered something depressing. The site is MySpace.com, and it may be more familiar now than it was a few weeks ago due to the fact that a young student named Taylor Behl may have met her murderer through it.

The concept behind MySpace.com is simple. You’re given a page, essentially an advertisement telling people who you are, what you look like, what your interests are, etc., and like-minded people can find you there and “Friend” you, until you’ve accrued dozens, and sometimes thousands, of these “Friends”. For a writer, the benefits of such a place are obvious. Not only do you have exposure to hundreds of thousands of potential readers, but it also comes with a “bulletin” tool for announcements, and a built-in “journal”.

For my search, I decided to look for readers to invite them to my little cyber-campfire for promotional purposes. Of the 70 or so names that came up, about 15 of them favored horror or suspense (mostly King, Koontz, with the occasional Barker or Gaiman fan); another 30 preferred chick-lit titles like “The Devil Wears Prada” and “He’s Not Really That Into You”. And here’s what I found written in the BOOKS section of the rest of the bios: (Note: These are all taken directly from the site):

1. Books? You’re kidding, right?
2. Does cosmo count?
3. I hate to read.
4. Why read when theirs movies?
5. What r books?
6. hate reading.
7. I read for college, so don’t need to read anything else.
8. I don’t read.
9. I hate reading but the H Potter books were good.
10. Only magazines.
11. I suck at redding.
12. Only book that I read from time to time is the Holy Bible.
13. Only smart people read books.
14. I can’t read.
15. I don’t read much, I figure all good books get made into movies.
16. Playboy.
17. DaVinci Code
18. What are these?
19. I am not a fan of books.
20. Don’t really read.
21. Maxim. FHM. That sort of stuff.
22. Don’t sweat the small stuff.
23. What r books? Oh right, the things with pages.
24. F**k that!
25. Too busy livin!

Somewhat annoyed by the vehemence with which a lot of these people denounced books and reading as a hobby, I started hitting profiles at random, with no keywords. And rather than uncovering a trove of voracious readers, the number of ‘book haters’ tripled.

Yes, the pulpit beckons, but I’m going to park my Bookmobile on the centerline and let the engine idle for a moment, because there are some statistics from my search worth noting before fingers are pointed or heads are scratched.

All my searches combined revealed that 68% of those MySpace members are currently attending college or have recently graduated.

Another 15% were in their mid-to-late twenties.

The rest were over thirty.

That’s a lot of profiles, a lot of people, and one tiny search in one tiny corner of the Internet.

But it’s hardly an encouraging thing to find while you’re exploring promotional avenues, and if nothing else, tempts one to believe those statisticians who tell us, with increasing regularity, that the amount of people who read for fun is declining.

Should we believe it? And if so, where does that leave those of us cursed with the compulsion to write?

Perhaps I should start researching Prada.