This is often asked in the contemporary book world but, when you stop and consider, the question is a strange one. For a start, it assumes that you had a target audience in mind—that is, you were writing not to gratify yourself or perhaps an inner compulsion but instead to appeal to some imagined group of other people. One wonders how Cervantes would have answered such a question, or the gloomy Jonathan Swift. How would Joyce have responded? Perhaps “Displaced Irishmen, exiled by disposition, paying back the English by dismembering their language” (which would have comprised a target audience of two: himself and Samuel Beckett). Maybe Nabokov would have found the answer easier: “Pedophiles.”
Nevertheless, that’s how it goes now—authors are expected to write for a target audience. I suppose that books might be produced this way, but not literature. This helps explain the desert that is the contemporary book world, at least in fiction. Here’s a practical demonstration: quick, name a current author. Don’t dwell, just note down the first one you think of.
A generation ago, some great writers would have instantly sprung to mind: Don DeLillo, Donna Tartt, Brett Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney. A generation before that, even better: Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger. And before that, better still: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner. And these are just Americans, and just novelists, but even with those twin limitations the line goes back unbroken to colonial times: Sinclair Lewis, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Edgar Alan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and many others.
Now, be honest: is whoever you thought of in the same league? Hard to think of any contemporary fiction writers at all, other than producers of formulaic pulp—books whose only purpose is to serve as predigested pap for the intellectually toothless, and whose authors no doubt do have a target audience.
When I was a kid I once walked into a bookstore and discovered a new (to me) novel by John Fowles. I was delighted by this find and soon had the volume at home, reading it from cover to cover straight through. That book was DANIEL MARTIN and I reread it multiple times over the years, enough to break the spine. What author of today would engender such excitement? Their spines would certainly be safe; hard enough to get through them even once. In fact, these days it would be difficult to find a bookstore in the first place.
How to account for this current dearth of readable books? I think the “Who is the target audience?” question is an important clue. It implies more than just the assumption that authors write not in consequence of some inner desire or need. It also implies that the proper purpose of authorship is not to write at all; it is simply to sell—in other words, we’re not really talking about books anymore; we’re talking about commerce. That commerce happens to be in books, but it could be any product: clothing, cars, cosmetics, whatever.
This wasn’t always the case. When publishing companies in America were privately or narrowly held, and there were dozens of them, the book world was a vibrant hothouse of talent and ideas, but the days when a Max Perkins would take a chance on Fitzgerald or a Sylvia Beach would publish the unpublishable Joyce are long gone; neither GATSBY nor ULYSSES would ever reach print today. The business aim then was to sell books—preferably but not always profitably; it was the books that mattered. Now, just a small handful of very large corporations control American publishing. And—as with any publicly-listed corporation—there is a single overriding business imperative: to maximize return on equity. A book’s merit in this context is reduced solely to its marketability; beyond that, whatever’s between the covers is irrelevant. So it is that genuinely good books—the ones you were actually excited to find—disappeared when the publishers were consolidated into a few corporate behemoths. In other words, the current economic forces that shape the industry are the reason why there are no longer towering literary figures whose names are household.
The people who run these companies don’t read books themselves; they have books pitched to them. The only things they read are spreadsheets. If quizzed about the questionable quality of their product, they would no doubt claim to be just catering to the public. This assertion—a common defense used by corporate-controlled media companies to paper over the deterioration under their ownership; think of the fate of the Times under Murdoch, or CNN under Time Warner, or Twitter under Musk—was best answered long ago by perhaps the greatest of modern English-language writers, T.S. Eliot (incidentally, like the protagonist in JOURNAL OF THE SUPERNOVA, both an American and Englishman): “Those who claim to give the public what they want,” he stated, “begin by underestimating the public taste; they end by debauching it” (T.S. Eliot,1961, verbal testimony investigating BBC broadcasting, as quoted in ELIOT AFTER THE WASTE LAND by Robert Crawford, p. 473).
Take that, Murdoch and Musk!
JOURNAL OF THE SUPERNOVA