Case Studies of Writers whose Popularity Underwent Rises and/or

Declines

The Lives of Famous writers, what they Accomplished and where

they Failed to Succeed.

English 380: The Business of Literature - SPRING 2018 II

Mecaj Klisio

  Eleni Godi
 Apparently, both in contemporary and modern era, authors had to deal with
several issues. A difficult aspect of an author’s career was how hard it was for them to
gain popularity in order for their books to be recognizable. However, many authors
have experiences ups and downs in their popularity levels, something that has had an
effect in their careers.
What should be included among them is the dramatic decline of their popularity
through the years. Concerning our contemporary era, as Danuta Kean claims in her
article “Book sales boom but authors report shrinking incomes”, based on an author
who preferred to stay anonymous: “It’s Amazon’s fault entirely that book prices have
not increased in the last 20 years,” he said, and referred to his first bestseller. “It was
sold at £25 20 years ago and my latest book is also to be sold at the same price,
which, in real terms, is a drastic cut.” (Kean, 2018). Also, based on Adam Rowe, in
the article “Why Authors Are Earning Less Even As Book Sales Rise”: “Years of
experience doesn't shield authors from dropping income, as the same survey found
that professionals with more than 15 years of experience experienced the largest
negative change in income between 2009 and 2015.” (Rowe, 2018). Thus, considering
that countless authors are not able to promote themselves and increase their popularity
would not seem illogical. However, apart from the above-mentioned we should not
avoid to mention about the seemingly declined popularity of 20th century authors.
What can cause a sudden increase or decrease in the popularity of writers is the type
of content their books have, more specifically, the genre. With the passage of years,
the types of genres people find interesting may change dramatically, something that
may be affected by many factors including promotion on the internet and the TV. The
most logical reason may be that people find different thing interesting as the time
passes, something that sums up why people were deeply interested in a writer’s books
ten years ago but are not so now, due to different trends existing now.
A genre which has been a massive success, having sold 18, 7 million copies in 2017,
is crime books, and the reasons for that may be a combination of a number of factors,
including the feeling of interaction readers may experience. As Michelle Davies said
“Crime fiction really is the most interactive form of reading – readers are essentially
armchair detectives who want to work out whodunit before we reveal it. “ That could
be seen as an acceptable explanation as to why people in the modern world like crime
novels so much. Through the crime genre, readers do have a more interactive role and
may sometimes become deeply invested in the characters, the plots and the solving of
the crime, a thing different from reading another genre. Sarah Vaughan’s opinion as
to why crime novels have become such a huge success was quite a bit different.
“Crime fiction allows us to explore our darkest fears in a safe setting – the world is an
uncertain place right now and the closure offered by a crime novel can be comforting:
the perpetrators of the crime will usually experience justice by the end. “ This
explanation is a more detailed one and tries to explain the state of mind of individuals
reading a crime novel, who enjoy the feeling of fear and anxiety but prefer their
personal safety. This way, through novels involving crime and mystery, these readers
feel what the book’s character feel and experience, while not putting their selves on
risk.
As mentioned above, the popularity of genres changes after a number of years,
meaning that the sales of a genre increase vary and mostly depend on its popularity.
The fall in the popularity of a genre can have an immediate effect in the careers of
writers, whose books may suddenly be seen as not interesting due to more popular
kinds of books being seen as interesting. This has the ability to affect the economic
lives of writers, whose popularity has now been reduced along with the genre’s
popularity.  (SCHRIBER, 1981)
The rise or fall in a writer’s popularity is not only based on the existing trends, as
people in some cases stopped enjoying a writer’s book for not entirely known reasons,
something that can be seen the Dostoevsky’s case, who had a sudden obstacles in his
career which he did not see coming.

Dostoevsky is seen as one of the most influential and important writers of all time,
having written books which are highly rated and incredibly popular such as “Crime
and Punishment”, “The Idiot” and many others. However, Dostoevsky’s story is one
of the main examples of a writer’s decline in popularity, and shows how quickly
people can change their opinions. Dostoevsky certainly did not have an easy life and
had been through many difficulties throughout his life. A thing that is well known for
Dostoevsky is his gambling addiction, which led to many economic problems. He was
a victim of a mock execution, after spending eight months in prison for his
involvement in a secret group of people whose goal was to spread propaganda and
start a revolution, something that stigmatized him for the rest of his life. After the
mock execution, he served four years in a prison labour camp in Siberia. There, he
suffered his first epilepsy seizure, something that followed him for the rest of his
life(Morson, 1998). Despite all the hardship, the beginning of Dostoevsky’s career
was very different from the rest of his dramatic life.
The release of his first novel, “Poor Folk’, caught the eye of Vissarion Belinsky, a
famous critic at the time, who was very impressed by the talented young writer, and
even described Dostoevsky as the heir to Gogol. This statement not only caused a
change in the way people saw Dostoevsky but also in the way he thought of himself.
His name was now recognizable in his hometown of St. Petersburg, and success had
now gotten to his head. He went from being a newcomer trying to make a name for
himself to an incredibly beloved writer that people respected in a matter of days. He
was proud of his achievement and hoped that he would continue to have be this well-
known and respected for years to come. To fulfill his ambitions he decided to publish
his next book, something he thought would be the next step in his career, while also
will help him economically. However, the reactions his second book received were
not the same. Dostoevsky, now overly confident of his abilities and his bright future
was not ready to face the bad reviews and the disapproval of society and critics, and
was not perceived as a genius writer anymore. In fact, most people were now thinking
of him as a joke, something that broke his confidence in writing for a very long time.
The odd thing here is not that Dostoevsky failed to stay on top. There have been
countless young aspiring writers who failed to stay relevant for a long time or in his
case, failed to make an impact in their first try. The almost unbelievable thing in
Dostoevsky’s story is that he managed to fall from grace in fifteen days, exactly after
he published his second book, “The Double”.
Dostoevsky’s story shows exactly how quickly could people change their minds about
writers, thus the power they had to increase and decrease the popularity of a writer in
a matter of days. Despite this information, the reason as to what caused people to drop
their interest in Dostoevsky in such a short period of time is not entirely known, as
such an act could be described as extreme. A possible explanation could be that his
reputation was not strong enough to begin with and the fact that his second book did
not appeal to critics as much as the first one and that caused readers to lose faith in his
work as a writer. There is a very strong chance that people thought he did not live up
to the expectations they had for him and that made them to judge him way harder than
they should have. Nevertheless, history has proven that Dostoevsky deserved all that
credit he was given in the beginning of his career as he not only is considered one of
the best writers of all time but also managed to fix his image while he was alive. His
book “Crime and Punishment” is seen as his most important achievement and is
considered one of the greatest and most popular books of all time, a book he wrote
twenty years after the release of his first book, “Poor Folk”.
This shows how much the failure of his second book harmed his confidence, but one
of the reasons it was so successful is that Dostoevsky was now a more experienced
man, who grew from the difficult situations he went through. As a result, it is possible
that his way of writing was now more complete and matured. Dostoevsky is a writer
who is known for the way he involves psychology in his books and for exploring the
motives of his characters along with their state of mind and what led them to some
actions, such as madness and murder. Through his dramatic life, which involved
torture, imprisonment, psychological illness and a very sudden decline in popularity
as a writer, he managed to evolve as a write, something that established him as a
talented and successful writer, despite his failed try to remain important to critics and
readers, something that has occurred in a lot of cases.
For example, based on Matt Reimann, in his article “Poor Authors: Great Works
Written in Times of Financial Scarcity” Henry Miller was another one author who had
to deal with decline. Specifically, based on Reimann: “His infamous novels Tropic of
Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn were banned in the US and Britain for obscenity.
They chronicled the sexual experience. Miller’s luck began to turn around when he
found benefactors who believed in his work, the most notable of them being writer
and his lover Anais Nin.” (Reinmann, 2015). Undoubtedly, except of Miller, there is
also a high number of authors who struggled due to declining and rejection.

Specifically, one author who should be included among them is Cormac McCarthy.
According to Matt Reinmann, in his foresaid article “Poor Authors: Great Works
Written in Times of Financial Scarcity”: “Despite gaining traction as a respected
novelist, McCarthy would turn down lucrative speaking engagements, claiming that
everything that needed to be said was already on the page. This meant continued
poverty, a condition which got him kicked out of a New Orleans motel charging only
$40 a month in rent.” (Reinmann, 2015). Undoubtedly, McCarthy decided to stay true
to his art even though that resulted in him constantly experiencing poverty something
that urged him to describe his life in the auto-biographical novel he wrote, “Suttree” .
Another example of an author having a hard life is J.K Rowling. She knew that she
wanted to be a writer since she was a child: "Certainly the first story I ever wrote
down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called Rabbit," "He got the measles
and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee. And ever since
Rabbit and Miss Bee, I have wanted to be a writer, though I rarely told anyone so."
Said Rowling in a 1998 interview(Shamsian, 2018).
However, it was not until 1997, when J.K Rowling was 32 years old, that “Harry
Potter: The Philosopher’s Stone” was published, and by that point J.K had been
through some situations which damaged her. A very strong experience was the death
of her mother, which she describe as “The most traumatizing day of her life”. The
decision to move to Portugal came when she was 26 years old, where she would work
as an English teacher. There she married and gave birth to her daughter. After her
separation with her husband, she returned to UK where she had no choice but to live
off government welfare. "I couldn't have written this book if I hadn't had a few years
where I’d been really as poor as it's possible to go in the UK without being homeless,"
J.K Rowling suffered from severe depression for an amount of time, something that
made her consider committing suicide. "We're talking suicidal thoughts here, we're
not talking 'I'm a little bit miserable,'" However, her rise to the top was so sudden that
it could only be described as a miracle, knowing that she had been rejected many
times in her career by that time. The reasoning as to why publishers rejected a book
which some years later would go on to become one of the biggest successes is in fact
what shows how important timing is.
Despite the fact that J.K Rowling had one brilliant idea, which she worked on for
years until she had perfected, publishers were not interested in it because they thought
that people preferred other types of genres and would not pay to read a book like
Harry Potter. What her book managed to do was to urge people to start looking into
other genres again, such as fantasy stories. "Nobody wanted to touch fantasy stories
— they were seen as old-fashioned," says Michelle Smith, senior lecturer in literature
at Deakin University. With Harry Potter, J.K Rowling managed to bring back a genre
which was not interesting anymore, while completely changing the genre young fans
preferred.
But young fans were not the only ones who loved Harry Potter. What J.K managed to
do is create fictional world through her books, which was full of literal magic,
something that urged millions of people to fall in love with the story of her book.
Harry Potter could not be restricted by the barrier known as “popular genre”, a barrier
the book broke and recreated. Both J.K. Rowling’s and Harry Potter’s story managed
to defy the odds and succeed, something that was once thought to be impossible.
To sum up, it is not a secret that a great number of authors have strived to stay
relevant throughout their careers, as sometimes circumstances do not allow their
books to find the success they might have found in another time. That is not the sole
reason why writers may come across economic problems, as it is clear that the
stability of the book prices in the last decades which means that books are very cheap
nowadays, something that plays a major role in those problems writers are dealing
with. A company responsible for this is Amazon, which keeps the book prices so low,
something that puts all authors in economic danger, despite the experience each may
have. Also, it is obvious that with the passage of time, people get invested in different
types of books, and a book that was considered interesting in the 1960s might not be
in the 2000s. This happens for many reasons, including the promotion of various
genres on TV or on the Internet. This fall in the popularity of a genre can seriously
affect the career of a writer who specialized on the now not widely popular genre. On
the other hand, attention to other types of genres, such as crime novels which are quite
successful in our times, mean that crime novel author will find themselves in a nice
economic position. The reasons as to why people may stop being interested in an
author could be more complicated, as in the Dostoevsky’s case. His story proved that
despite his great start, people stopped supporting him very quickly, after just 15 days,
for unknown reasons, considering the love everyone showed him for his first book. In
spite of this horrific experience, Dostoevsky spent years growing both as a person and
as a writer and made his return with a great book which established him as one of the
greatest of all time and showed his potential and fixed his career. The story of Henry
Miller was definitely not similar, as the author had his books banned in the US for
obscenity and he found it difficult to find someone who believed in his work until he
met Anais Nin. Others, such as Corman McCarthy decided to express themselves
solely through their books, and as in his case, preferred to turn to money in order to
keep their beliefs unharmed. Lastly, J.K. Rowling fought hard against her bad luck,
broke barriers and established herself as one of the most successful authors of her
generation, while battling the hardships life threw at her such as depression and the
deaths of close ones.

Sources:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2018/08/11/why-authors-are-earning-less-
even-as-book-sales-rise/#7dcce9895b6d
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/19/book-sales-skyrocket-but-authors-
report-shrinking-incomes
https://blog.bookstellyouwhy.com/poor-authors-great-works-written-in-times-of-
financial-scarcity
Shamsian, J. (2018). How J.K. Rowling went from struggling single mom to the
world's most successful author. [online] INSIDER. Available at:
https://www.thisisinsider.com/jk-rowling-harry-potter-author-biography-2017-7
[Accessed 21 Sep. 2018].
Morson, G. (1998). Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Russian author. [online] Encyclopedia
Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fyodor-Dostoyevsky
[Accessed 21 Sep. 2018].
Utton, D. (2018). Crime Pays: Six leading crime-fiction authors explain why theirs is
the most popular genre. [online] Express.co.uk. Available at:
https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/books/945105/crime-fiction-leading-
authors-explain-genres-popularity [Accessed 21 Sep. 2018].