I only thought of this today, and just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that authors aren’t credited at all. Their names would still be inside the book, in the publishing/copyright information and so on, and there’d still be a list of other books by the same writer for anyone who really enjoyed their work and wanted to see what else they’d done. But what if that was the only place on a book that the author’s name appeared, and it wasn’t on the jacket cover or in any especially prominent position?
The reason I’m suggesting this is that I think so often these days, books are promoted in relation to who wrote them more than they are in relation to what they’re actually about. Particularly with how many books are promoted with a celebrity’s name on it (which has often been written by a ghost writer anyway), I think this makes it harder for books that aren’t by well-known names to get noticed. This feels unfair on new authors, and as a reader like they’re focussing on the wrong bit – I think most authors would prefer that more people bought, read and enjoyed their books, irrespective of whether they know who wrote them.
I think it could also have an impact on minimising things like unconscious racism and sexism. It would mean readers would be less likely to discriminate against women, or people with foreign-sounding names, or anything like that (I have no idea how much that happens already, to be fair – for all I know it could be a non-issue, but just an idea.)
by georgemillman
12 Comments
Oh boy
I would find this annoying. There are authors I really like. I want to read more or all of their books. I do not want to always have to search lists or look at the cover page to find who wrote it, if I am in say a used book store. As far as e-books, well those will tell you the author whether you look at the cover or not.
The publishing industry doesn’t exist to be as fair as possible. It exists to make money. The fact that a book is written by a famous or popular author helps the book sell, which helps the publisher make money. And if the publisher didn’t make money, then they wouldn’t be able to afford to publish books by unknown authors.
If a book is by my favorite author, I want to know that. I don’t want that information hidden away.
Also, how would books be organized at the bookstore? By title? That means each book in a series could be on a totally different shelf, and it would be hard to hunt them down if, say, you want the next book in a series but don’t know what it’s called.
Are you suggesting books be displayed alphabetically by Title alone?
What a waste of time it would be if you needed to open every book to check their author. Books can have similar titles. Also, what a pain it would be to sort your library when you can’t see the author at first glance. There are people like me who enjoy picking up random books but others might feel tricked by the lack of forefront information, or don’t want to make the effort. It would be a very good way to push away readers. In the end, it’s an industry. Publishers want to sell, not to yell ‘surprise!’ at their customers.
Authors would lose their fucking minds and fight this tooth and nail. Authors care about sales above all else and this would cut into their sales, so it’d be viewed as intolerable.
Assuming that this is feasible, I am not sure it would be very beneficial. I personally like to choose books based on who the author is because it usually guarantees a certain level of quality in the writing. For example, I recently bought a book by one of my favorite writers. I only noticed the book because I recognized the author’s name and remembered I had liked a previous book, so I picked this one even though I hadn’t heard of it before. If I hadn’t found this book, I likely would have left the bookstore without having purchased anything.
In an ideal world, the readers would pick books by authors they don’t know just because they are feeling adventurous or because they would like to read a more diverse set of books. However, most people are only adventurous to a certain extent. I personally try to give other authors a chance, but I always come back to a few favorites that are basically my source for ‘comfort reading’ material. If it was harder for me to find books by those authors, then it would make me less likely to read, it wouldn’t do much to encourage me to diversify my reading as the whole activity would feel like a chore.
Kitt Williams had books where the titles didn’t appear on the cover, so why not.
God, that’s the worst idea I’ve heard today. No thank you.
Big nope. I enjoy certain authors. They’ve proven their ability to entertain me. It’s not about their race or their sex it’s just about the fact that they write books that I like. I don’t always know when they have new books come out so sometimes when I’m browsing books online or in a store I see an author’s name pop out it’s the first notice I have that they have a new book out.
Also, why should an author get more attention just because they were kind of tricked into someone picking up their book. I think the better judge of their talent is they were able to write a book that was so well received people who would not normally buy their work or by work by someone like them have been convinced to pick up their book.
Lol no but for some authors I find it very off putting like when you read a YA book and the author is so obviously the main character or some books written by older men that are very gritty and sensual and then somehow make me feel gross after I see the author pic. But thats just me and I might be biased.
I am a minority writer, and your idea has quite a lot of problems.
1. Quality is heavily dependent on author. It matters.
2. Hiding author names, assuming it worked, means people looking for books from their favorite unknown author wouldn’t find them as easily.
3.The worst problem is it would make the in-store experience less useful and it would fail utterly everywhere else. You would have to change the way the entire industry works top to bottom.
4. It is tough to get our names out there and be seen, but zero authors are *entitled* to be seen. Hurting every established author is a non-starter on every level. Is it fun being a brand in order to become well known? Nope. Is it how the planet works? Yes.
Sure, we as a species should help where we can to increase the richness of voices in various arts. You can go out and start a website right now dedicated to marginalized authors you want to promote. That is a great place to start and I recommend it. A word of warning, if you don’t make sure your recommendations are for high quality books, the site will fail. It cannot just be “unknown or minority.” It needs to be “hidden gems worth reading.”