People Want What Somebody Wants

So, I’ve been thinking for the last few days about a recent comment that “The people want what they want,” and trying to decide how much I agree with it. The conclusion I’ve come to is that I completely agree, if you modify it to, “The people will pay for what they will pay for.” That makes the world go ’round, for sure. The wanting, however, strikes me as a more complicated question.

And it’s interesting, because publishing seems to be an industry that’s influenced by “what the people want” far more than many. Word of mouth can still yank a book out of obscurity, and the occasional good book even hits because it’s good. Many of the perennial bestsellers are–whatever else you want to say about them–masterful fucking storytellers. They’ve become brand names not because they’re marketed to the moon and back, but because their readers understand that they reliably provide a certain kind of entertainment. The first thing you learn in publishing is that marketing doesn’t work; it helps, if a book’s building steam for other reasons–Oh, right, now that I see that poster in Barnes and Noble, I remember that Betsy from Mommy and Me told me I totally have to read that–but you can buy all the full-page ads and store displays you want, and it won’t increase your sales measurably unless the book finds some other way to generate momentum.

The second thing you learn in publishing is that publishers have no fucking idea what the people want. A given book won’t necessarily sell just because ten books like it have sold in the last few years, or the author’s last book was a killer, or, you know, because it’s well-written. No matter how much the increasing corporatization of the industry tightens production margins, it still takes too damn long to produce a book in response to what’s hot now. So you attempt to prognosticate what will be hot down the line, and it’s pretty much a crapshoot. The trend you anticipate might be over by the time your book hits the market, or it might turn out to be no trend at all, or it might still be two years from sprouting wings, but you can’t be sure, and meanwhile, you’ve got all these books in your warehouse, so maybe you should just remainder the fuckers and call it a day–and all of that’s on top of the fact that you’re only guessing whether people will want a book related to that trend in the first place. (I own a very nice coffee table book on mendhi, which I got free at some trade show, and which came to market at about exactly the time mendhi was peaking as a Klassy fake tattoo option. But did anybody give a rat’s ass about the history of the art, or illustrations of it, beyond what they could get in an Elle article? Not so you could notice it.)

And therein lies my problem with the “people want what they want” idea: nobody really knows what the people want. It’s just that, in many industries–not publishing, alas–the people can usually be informed of what they want in advance of the product’s arrival.

Off the top of my head, I can think of only one product that’s become available in the last five years that I actually desperately wanted when it was unavailable: my beloved Gap Curvy jeans. In the five years before that, it was petite bootcut jeans–for a long damn time there, the only people making jeans that corresponded to the length of my legs (more or less) were also only making high-waisted, pegged jeans; the shorty market was not assumed to overlap with the actually-interested-in-wearing-styles-from-this decade market. Or, probably more accurately, the shorty market was considered undesirable, much like the fatty market, so it took a long time for mainstream designers to appreciate that, no matter how much our imperfect bodies might diminish the cachet of their label, we had a hell of a lot of disposable income burning holes in the pockets of our high-waisted, pegged jeans.

Given all this, one could argue that eventually, manufacturers do respond to what people want; I know there are a lot of lovely beanpoles out there who are equally psyched about the wider availability of “tall” inseams and the “straight” fit. And for those of us who have been over Size 14, the breadth of relatively fashionable options out there now is staggering, compared to 10 or 15 years ago. Eventually, Corporate America catches on to crazy notions like, “Women will pay for things that look good on them.”

But what did I–and zillions of women–do in those years before “eventually?” We rolled up our way-too-long jeans and bought oversized, V-neck, shaker knit sweaters at Lane Bryant, because they looked just like the ones from The Limited, i.e., “normal,” and we looked forty pounds heavier than we were and couldn’t even show off our curvy-girl cleavage, ’cause we had to wear the V-neck on the wrong fucking side to fit in, so we were walking around looking like big, powder blue and peach rumpus-room beanbags, and damn fool beanbags at that, but what was the alternative? That’s one example off the top of my head. You want a thousand more?

What we did before we got what we wanted was, we wore clothes that didn’t fit, didn’t flatter–and we paid the same good money for them that we now pay for cute stuff that’s more-or-less designed for our bodies. Nobody gave a damn what we wanted until it finally fucking dawned on them that we might buy even more of that. Before then, they just told us what to want–including, as always, a body that would best show off the clothes we were instructed to want–and cheerfully took the money we handed over in defeat.

There’s a huge difference between what the people want and what they will pay for. I’ve bought a pair of birthin’-hips jeans at every Gap in town, hoping against hope that I can single-handedly make it appear as if there’s a market for them all over Chicago. Because I have already seen, in the 5 and a half months since they arrived, that they are endangered; after introducing the new fits in roughly equal measure last August, they’ve now made the “curvy” section smaller than the “straight,” which is waaaay smaller than the “original.” There aren’t enough of us with little waists and big asses, or we don’t shop at the Gap, or we don’t want to admit to being “curvy”–or, you know, those of us who want them can’t get them, because the larger sizes are inevitably picked over, while some genius at Gap Headquarters is scratching his head about all the non-selling size 0s and 2s in a cut that assumes one has body fat. Whatever the reason, the bootylicious among us are being re-marginalized already, and if we don’t pony up big-time, the jeans will probably disappear. [Update, 3/27/07: Except for a few remaining sale pairs, the curvy jeans now appear to be gone. Thank god I discovered Levi's relaxed bootcuts in the interim.]

So the thing is, what will I do then, other than wear out the 347 pairs of curvies I’ve already bought? Start buying custom-made jeans, because that’s what I want? Maybe. More likely, I will bow to the god of immediate gratification and just go back to cinching up my favorite original cut with a big belt. (Definition of irony: the most flattering original cut on me is “long and lean.”) I will be pissed and saddened, but I will continue to fork it over. In that case, as in many others, there’s no quantifiable difference between what I want and what I will pay for. Thus, there’s no reason in the world for The Gap to care about my actual desires; I am utterly their bitch.

And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of “what we want” being a function of what we’re told to want. Twenty years ago, you wouldn’t have worn a pair of low-waisted, flared jeans any more than a poodle skirt. The concept was horrifying. People vowed sincerely that they would never participate in the return of bellbottoms, so patently idiotic an idea were they in the first place. Now look down at your jeans–what do you see there? And they look good, don’t they? And the fitted top you’ve got on with them–it’s all flattering, right? It’s exactly what you want to be wearing, because it looks fucking great on you. So what if you legitimately thought high waists and pegged ankles and oversized tops and drop waists and leggings and puffy sleeves were hot when you were younger–that was too long ago to remember, and you know better now. Everyone knows better now! Such sartorial travesties can never happen again! Oh, sure, you’ve seen this shit around for the last couple of years. But it’s not really happening. People haven’t lost their senses entirely: look at how well gauchos are moving. $6.99, y’all!

Give it a couple more years. You know goddamn well it’s happening. [Another update, 3/27.07: AM I RIGHT??] And you know you’re eventually going to buy something you swore you’d abandoned permanently twenty years ago–not because you’ve capitulated to marketing and availability, of course, but because suddenly, you’re rethinking things. Suddenly, bike shorts under miniskirts seem like a brilliant way to control your thighs, keep warm, and maximize freedom of movement, rather than a direct route to ludicrous stumpiness. Suddenly, it makes perfect sense that giganto sweaters will make you look thinner! How did you ever think something that revealed your figure was a good thing? Suddenly, you’re not quite sure why, but dammit if those puffy sleeves aren’t cute!

‘Cause that’s how it works, and how it’s always worked. Bleeeeargh. For my part, I am just unutterably grateful that a handful of A-listers wore dresses with wide straps and higher necklines to the Golden Globes, because it means that by the time I’m shopping for KJ’s wedding, there might actually be more than one fancy dress on the racks that I can wear a bra with. If you can’t beat ‘em, wait a decade and you’ll sort of be allowed to join ‘em. For a while.

As for books, there is literally only one reliable predictor of sales if the author is not already a household name: Oprah’s endorsement. The people want what Oprah wants. (And they’re specific about it, too. Apparently, nobody’s discovering these authors, falling in love, and seeking out their backlists. They are buying the Oprah picks, and that’s that.) Does anybody think Elie Wiesel’s stoked about having his name mentioned in the same breath as James Frey’s? I mean, fuck, if ever there were a man who’d earned the right to pull a Jonathan Franzen, it’d be him. It ain’t like he’s an unknown–the book’s been in print for ages, he’s written dozens of others, and he already enjoys perennial sales to the academic market, which any author would kill for. Also, the book’s fucking good. There’s that. Nevertheless, none of that stacks up to Oprah telling the people to want it; every writer wants to be read, and failing that, wants his books to sell, and no one has yet figured out a better way to make that happen. Sure, there are observable trends–memoir’s currently hotter than fiction, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And it is possible to generate hype for a book–but only to an extent. Go ask the first ten people you see in the street if they know who Benjamin Kunkel is. Then ask if they’ve seen King Kong. When it comes to books, advertising and publicity just do not burrow into the collective unconscious the same way they do with clothes, movies, music; there’s simply no channel for telling the people what they want, other than Oprah.

All of which leaves publishers guessing, again and again, what the people want. And getting it wrong, like, 80 percent of the time. Thank God for the Rowlings and Kings and Grishams and Steeles, and for Oprah, because their work is footing the bill for most of the new authors that get published; if publishers actually needed to get a good return on the majority of titles they publish, the risks wouldn’t be worth it. Because there’s just no telling what the people want, unless you’ve told them in the first place.