I read over eight chapters today--for the most part, I'm very happy with it. There's one part I want to condense, but other than that it was just minor corrections. The early chapters bothered me much less this pass.
Notice how as I return my attention to the book, the impulse to write long blog posts returns? I was feeling like they were kind of a waste of time, and I'm not really arguing that they aren't, but I guess they're a symptom that my brain is back in Book Mode.
I mentioned that one of the fun things about the retail business is that you can see for yourself how it works. But that is not entirely true.
Let's travel back in time to the year 2000 (remember when that was in the future? You don't? Oh, shut up), when I was a business reporter working for a newspaper in New Jersey. There was a bagel chain called Einstein Bros. Bagels, and everyone loved them. They executed marvellously: beautiful shops, yummy products, reasonable prices, pleasant customer service. Every Einstein Bros. Bagels in the region had a line out the door and halfway around the block every morning.
And they went into bankruptcy.
WHAT HAPPENED!?! people shrieked.
The answer was something that no retail customer could see: They were paying too much rent. Competition for high-traffic retail spaces is fierce, and Einstein Bros. had decided it was worth paying an arm and a leg for desirable spaces.
It wasn't, but that's not the point. The point is, from a customer perspective, Einstein Bros. did everything right--everything. To the customer, they looked like a thriving business. And they went into bankruptcy anyway (although they did come out of it eventually, so there are some benefits to having customers who love you).
Another vitally-important aspect of retail is inventory management. It's one of those things that customers notice only if it isn't happening: You go to the store for milk, and there's no friggin' milk. God damn it, the kids are screaming for milk, and you just wasted a trip--do these people realize how much gas costs nowadays? Screw it, you're never going back there--you'll go to Other Supermarket instead. Sure, they [cost more, are further away, are less child friendly, have surly staff, don't look as nice], but at least they have milk when you need it!
Inventory management isn't just about getting goods into a customer's hot little hands (although that's vitally important: If your business is exchanging goods for money, you'd better have some goods to exchange). It's about doing so cheaply.
Really super-duper, state-of-the-art inventory management makes it cheaper to get your goods to your customers. Wal-Mart is what it is today because they decided, hey, let's have our suppliers deliver goods to our stores. That way, we don't have to pay for gas or hire drivers! (You think I'm kidding, but I am perfectly serious.)
Do you know who else has fabulous, super-duper, state-of-the-art inventory management? AMAZON.
Why? Because Amazon started out selling books. Can you think of a class of goods that's a bigger pain in the ass from an inventory perspective than books? There's millions of titles! Even a single title can have multiple editions! People get really upset when you give them the wrong book! No one knows what books are going to become best-sellers!
Amazon is what it is today because it was able to leverage that inventory expertise into other goods. They're spending $90 million on a single warehouse, for Christ's sake, and it's not because they're building it out of gold--it's because their inventory systems are automated and computerized and very, very fancy. They are so good at getting random goods to the random people who want them that other retailers let Amazon fill their orders, knowing that Amazon does it better.
If you are trying to open up an on-line store that ships physical goods to people, you are going to have to compete with a company that has spent years learning how to ship goods to people, as well as gazillions of dollars on computer systems to help them manage inventory. You have to compete with a company that builds $90 million warehouses. This is no small task.
If you are trying to open an on-line store that sells e-books to people, that $90 million warehouse that Amazon is building does not matter. Their long years of experience in inventory management does not matter. When it comes to e-books, there is no inventory to manage.
This is why I hold the apparently shocking opinion that e-books do not really play to Amazon's strengths. They play to some of Amazon's strengths: Amazon is the dominant on-line retailer of physical books, so when people think "books" they think "Amazon." In addition, Amazon enables book discovery. If you are an author, uploading your book to Amazon is easy, and they offer a good royalty.
All good things. Amazon is executing its e-book strategy very well. Yay them.
But if they fail to keep executing well? Other brands (like, yes, Barnes & Noble, or let's pretend that some Web entrepreneur buys the Borders name) are associated with books, so if they executed their e-book businesses more-competently, they could be more-serious competition. Web sites like Goodreads and Library Thing exist for no other reason but to enable book discovery--that is all they do at the moment, but that could change. Making it easy for authors to upload books to a Web site does not cost $90 million, even if Google can't do it with $19 billion.
It's all about barriers to entry--is it hard for new players to enter a business, or is it easy? If you are talking about selling physical goods on-line, I would say that Amazon has some great barriers to entry--it would be very hard and very expensive to match their ability to manage inventory. If you're talking about selling digital goods...not so much. Amazon isn't without advantages, to be sure, but it's going to be a constant struggle for them--they can't just throw down $90 million and say, "Beat this."
(By the way, if you're wondering why Goodreads and Amazon can't seem to get along any more, I hope that makes more sense to you now.)
I keep reading things that seem to fall into one of two categories: Either it's the smug expectation that authors will surely continue to overpay massively for publishing services, because authors are entirely incapable of making good decisions, or it's hand-wringing that self-publishing will lead authors to their destruction, because authors are entirely incapable of making good decisions.
Notice a trend there?
Now, we all know people who are idiots about money. We all, at various points in time, have been idiots about money. Behavioral economics seeks to answer the question, Why are people such idiots about money?
In the face of all that idiocy, it's easy to loose sight of the fact that certain concepts from classical economics, such as the supply and demand curves, actually have held up quite well over the ages. There are definitely individuals who buck that trend (RANDOM JOKE SEGUE: Two New Russians who haven't seen each other in a while are catching up. One says, "That's a nice shirt!" The other says, "Do you like it? It cost $400!" The first says, "Sergei, you fool! I know where you can get that shirt for $600!"), but when you are talking about most people in most situations, the supply curve and the demand curve do hold up. That is why price and wage controls went out with Richard Nixon.
People are economically irrational. People are more often economically rational.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about: Mercedes resurrected the Maybach line nine years ago. In that time, 3,000 people bought Maybachs, which I think we can take as evidence that people are economically irrational--we're talking about a $450,000 car that apparently wasn't even as good as the other $450,000 car out there. But in the month of July 2010 alone, Toyota sold 27,345 Corollas, an economy car generally lauded for its value. In a single month, Toyota found nine times as many people willing to buy a Corolla than Mercedes found willing to buy a Maybach in nine years.
Bear in mind that despite the fact that the Maybach sold far below expectations, it kept going as a business for nine years. I have seen any number of companies with business plans that are positively offensive in their disregard for the intelligence of consumers. And they creep along. What they don't do is flourish--they don't fulfill early expectations, they just sort of eke it out quarter after quarter.
Modern self-publishing is a very new industry--just a little over two years old. There are scams, of course, but there is also a lot of learning and communication happening among writers. Writers, even traditionally-published writers, are getting more experienced and more knowledgeable about self-publishing every day.
That's a problem if your business is run on the expectation that everyone is going to fork money over to you forever, for no particular reason. Eventually, as people learn more about what they're doing, they're have a better notion of what constitutes value in this new industry. If you don't provide value, some people will certainly pay you anyway, at least for a little while, but before long you're going to start having problems with customer retention and a lack of recommendations. You may eke along, living off old contracts or whatnot, but flourish you will not.
As for the expectation that writers will destroy the market for books with freebies or whatever, I feel like some people have taken too much to heart the idea that writers are really bad at business. I mean, sure, some are and always will be, but remember the choice used to be, get published and get screwed, or don't get published. So of course authors lined up and clamored for a good reaming. That was actually writers being Homo economicus--if you wanted a career as a writer, being published, however horrible the terms, was better than not being published.
Now there's been a sudden transition in the industry, and writers who made their bones decades ago have been slow to catch up. That's to be expected. It doesn't mean they're necessarily stupid (although it is frustrating to watch), and it certainly doesn't mean that, as far as looking after their own financial self-interest is concerned, all authors are dangerous lunatics armed with a straight razor and an itchy throat.
If free doesn't work for people, I'm telling you, the vast majority will stop doing it. If KDP Select doesn't work for people, I'm telling you, the vast majority will stop doing it. If the 99-cent price point doesn't work for people, I'm telling you, the vast majority will stop doing it.
If they're still doing it five years from now, I'm telling you, it probably worked for them.
Maybe this is my humanist side coming through, but I really marvel at the assumption that everyone must be stupid--bone stupid, dumb as dirt. One of the things I like about economics is that it doesn't assume everyone--everyone!--is just an idiot. Here's a lesson from journalism: If someone is doing something you don't understand, it means you don't understand. You need more information; you need to talk to people. Assuming instead that you are the only intelligent person in all the land just reveals how limited you truly are.
...but apparently I did. I've got a kid today, and thanks to President's Day, I've got multiple kids and larger family members with days off who will require my attention coming up. So I guess I better get back in action tomorrow, no?
Part of the problem with me is that I have that whole one-thing-at-time focus. So I say, I'll take a couple of days off and work on the house! But the house is a HUGE freakin' mess (I am always simultaneously happy and distraught that I bought a fixer-upper), so one project leads very naturally to the next. I found myself yesterday starting a brand new project, and that's when I got very severe with myself and decided that I must switch gears back and finish Trust before I start anything new. The timing is a little unfortunate because in my brain spring = big garden plans, but I'll just have the garden on maintenance until Trust is out.
This is an instructive post (via PV) about why foreign books don't sell well in Japan. Have a look at the pictures--basically the books are shelved so that they are impossible to find. It's a real-world example of the importance of floor placement, and it's had this huge, longstanding impact on the Japanese book market--foreign books are not easy to buy, so voila, no one buys them.
This one from Dean Wesley Smith is worth a read. It's about not getting ripped off, which obviously is a topic close to my heart.
My favorite quote?
...electronic publishing is scary simple.
Does it take a learning curve? Yes. But so does Angry Birds. Actually, I think Angry Birds is harder to learn than electronic publishing.
I think he's probably right.
There's also a good comparison of the costs of e-publishing and traditional publishing. I know some people believe it when publishers tell them that e-books cost just as much to make as paper books. I assume they also believe it when guys tell them that ejaculate prevents wrinkles and is really good for the skin of the face.
So, there was this post on Passive Voice about how Amazon's exclusivity program might not work for everybody. Because if it's not 100% guaranteed to work for everybody, forever, well, then there's no point in even trying, is there?
And it kind of got on my nerves, because (neurosis alert!) it sounded like something my mother would say. My mother's one of these women who make a virtue out of never being an adult--"If you can't be it, marry it" is the kind of advice she used to give me. Of course she can't possibly be anything, what with her having two X chromosomes and all. So when people actually start doing things, she's first in line to pour on the cold water, because if you manage to accomplish something, and if she has to admit that that something was in fact worth accomplishing, then that implies that she could accomplish things were she willing to try, and she can't have that.
So I posted a comment there (there are, of course, many other comments there that are highly informative), and I'm going to repost it here, with links:
I think the thing that troubles me about this is the extreme tentativeness about trying something that, in the worst case scenario, won't work for you so you pull your book after three months.
I mean, no one is asking you to sign away rights, and we're not talking about playing Russian roulette. The risks of something like KDP Select aren't big, crazy risks; they are small, manageable risks.
Certainly you can make a rational decision that KDP Select is not for you, and I don't advocate replacing blind faith in tradpub with blind faith in Amazon. But there's so much out there about what might happen 10 or 20 years from now if events line up in a very particular way. And I think it makes people more afraid to experiment.
The opportunity cost of not trying stuff can be very high--think where Joe Konrath would be today if he hadn't been willing to experiment and throw some titles up on-line. You don't know what's going to pay off unless you try different things--some of those things most definitely will not work out, but that's how you learn and gain experience.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a great post on the importance of containing costs, especially early on. Remember, you are an entrepreneur running a business. If you want to pretend you're not, that won't change reality, it will just make it more likely you'll get ripped off.
And Lindsay Buroker has a great post on pricing. She takes a very useful perspective on it, which is to look at the possibilities of revenue-per-customer. So, if you only have one book out, and it's 99 cents, you can only possibly make 35 cents off each customer no matter what, whereas if you have a freebie followed by three books that are $5 a piece, you can make up to $10.50 off each customer. It's a very worthwhile way of evaluating your potential market, and of course it underscores the need to keep writing!
I finished this pass! Yay! Now it's printed out, and I'm going to let it sit for a few days while I work on really fun stuff, like taxes. Then I'll read over the hard copy, input corrections, and start the layout.
It's not the blog's fault: Saturday was a lost cause because I had mild food poisoning the night before, yesterday was crazy with appointments, and today I have the kid. Tomorrow I should be back on track.
I was thinking about potential rivals to Amazon and what they might look like.
If you are a reader, Amazon does two things very well: It enables book discovery, and it sells books.
But Amazon isn't the only Web site that does a good job enabling book discovery: Goodreads and Library Thing are also good at that. They don't sell books, though--instead, they link to where you can buy books.
Another way to enable book discovery is to specialize in a particular niche. And whaddya know, there's a site out there called All Romance that specializes in romance e-books (yes, of course, romance). It allows authors to upload books and set prices themselves, giving you 60% of the revenues.
Unlike Smashwords, All Romance doesn't do your file conversion for you--you upload what you have, and that's what's for sale. From a technical standpoint, it's simpler, because the authors are doing the file conversion--all All Romance needs to worry about is having a reliable Web host. Like Smashwords, All Romance doesn't appear to have a big corporate backer.
I think that as server space gets cheaper, more sites like this will crop up, specializing in particular genres. They'll offer fewer titles than Amazon, and probably won't have as powerful recommendation software--but they won't need that because they'll be offering fewer, more-specialized products.
In addition, if server space gets really cheap, I could see a site like Goodreads or LibraryThing offering titles themselves--instead users clicking over to Amazon to buy a recommendation, they click a button to buy from the site itself.
The thing about e-books is, they don't really play to Amazon's strengths other than their ability to make stuff easy to find. Amazon is very, very good about getting what you ordered into a package and to your door. But what does that matter with electronic goods? Look at other e-things--movies, music--and Amazon isn't the dominant player. That's why they're offering freebies to Prime members and soliciting exclusive offers--they know they have to sweeten the pot to keep people buying from them.
I went over through chapter 21--for whatever reason, the chapters in this part of the book are long, so that's actually a good deal of work.
I haven't really been getting the B tasks done, though, and there's other crap I need to do that I haven't been getting to. I think part of it is that I've been writing these huge blog posts--obviously, I find the subject as interesting as hell, but I probably need to pare back....
When I was a business reporter, in addition to enjoying covering entrepreneurs, I liked covering retail (and yes, there is considerable overlap between the two). The nice thing about retail is that you can see how it works, even if you don't realize at first glance what it is you're seeing.
One thing that baffles people at first glance is when they see, say, a Chinese restaurant open up, and then another opens up across the street, and a third opens two doors down, and a fourth opens one block over. They think, Oh, that must be bad for the first guy!
But it's usually not. If you have a bunch of Chinese restaurants in the same area, you have a district! The Chinese-food district! Got a hankering for Chinese? You'll go there, and then you'll look around and pick a place--the first place is really fancy, the second place just does take-out, the third specializes in seafood, and the fourth does spicy Sechuan.
Being located together helps all four restaurants.
It also helps that the restaurants don't all have the exact same menu or ambiance. They're not actually in competition, even if it seems that way at first glance. If you're in your sweats and just want something quick, you're going to go to the take-out place, not the fancy place. There may be some overlap (the fancy place probably carries some seafood, for example), but not a lot.
Each has a niche to serve.
Niches are key to retailers. Wal-Mart has a niche--low prices. The Wal-Mart shopper is extremely price-sensitive and doesn't care about anything else: You could put an $4,000 Cartier watch on sale at Wal-Mart for $500, and no one will buy it because $500 is still a lot to spend on a watch. Wal-Mart has for years attempted to move out of its niche and appeal to more-upscale shoppers, and for years it has gotten slammed for it--your Wal-Mart shopper goes to Dollar General when Wal-Mart's prices go up, and your upscale shopper will not shop at Wal-Mart. Ever.Wal-Mart could carry organic milk at half or a quarter of the price of Whole Foods, and your Whole Foods shopper wouldn't even know it.
Book retailing is niche-y, even if book retailers seem to be bent on pretending it's not. Take this Publishers Weekly article (via PV), which mentions a South Carolina regional publisher called Hub City that opened a bookstore last year to serve its niche market:
Last March, Hub City executive director Betsy Teter explained that “We have a Barnes & Noble in town, but it isn't terribly friendly to regional and local book producers.” In its first year, Hub City Bookshop sales exceeded projections by 77 percent.
Of course, the body of the article isn't about how indie bookstore realized long ago that they can't chase the same customer as Barnes & Noble and survive. No, it's about them getting upset about Amazon.
Do you hear the CEO of Cartier getting upset because Dollar General is challenging Wal-Mart? No? But, hey, they all sell jewelry--why shouldn't the CEO of Cartier give himself an ulcer over Wal-Mart's problems? Oh, because he knows his niche. He knows the average customer at Cartier would rather get shot in the face than buy jewelry at Dollar General or Wal-Mart. Likewise I'd bet the average Hub City customer doesn't even think about either Barnes & Noble or Amazon when they are looking for some South Carolina flavor--they just go right to Hub City, home to all books South Carolinian!
If you are selling your book as an author, it also makes a lot of sense to know your niche. It will not only help you position your book when you pick the cover and craft the jacket copy, it will also help you chose how to spend advertising dollars. You don't want to waste money advertising your romance to true-crime enthusiasts, for example, and if your book appeals to a relatively narrow niche, advertising that reaches a more general audience may well prove less effective.
When writers point out that getting press coverage or having a popular blog or using social media doesn't help sales (or conversely, that sucking at social media doesn't hurt sales), that happens because of niches. I think Joe Konrath's blog is wonderful--I read it regularly and really appreciate it. I also don't like horror novels, so I don't buy his books. His blog appeals to one niche (self-published authors) that I occupy, but his books appeal to another (lovers of the thriller/horror genre) that I do not. If Konrath wanted to, he could monetize his blog by selling ads, but his blog would still be a discrete business from his books--success in one does not translate to success in the other, because they appeal to separate niches.
One of the concerns I've seen expressed around and about, both by apologists for traditional publishers and by proud-to-be-indie authors, is that Amazon could create a monopoly on books. The concern is that Barnes & Noble will go down the toilet, and the major publishers will follow, and the only one left standing will be Amazon.
I don't doubt that Amazon would create a monopoly on books if it could--any company (really, any person) would love to have a monopoly on anything at all. If you have a real, honest-to-God, Ma Bell-style monopoly, you are in Fat City. You don't have to spend money on research and development, or customer service, or new infrastructure, or technology. You don't have to keep up with the times, keep clients happy, or hustle in any way. You are at that spot on the supply curve where everybody wants to be. That's why we have to have antitrust laws, and that's why they have to be enforced--monopolies are just too tempting.
But is it possible for Amazon to create a monopoly? Keep in mind that there's a huge difference between dominating a market and having a monopoly. You could control 90% of a particular market and not have a monopoly. If everybody buys a GM car because GM makes the cars everybody wants to buy, that's market domination. If everybody buys a GM car because if you buy another kind of car, the police come to your house and shoot you in the head, that's a monopoly. The same is true if gentler forms of coercion are used: If you buy a non-GM car and cannot buy fuel for it because GM owns all the gas stations, then you are facing a monopoly.
Right now, Amazon is selling the majority of e-books, and a number of authors are making their titles exclusive to Amazon, because Amazon does a better job selling indie titles than other Web sites. It might be fair to say that Amazon currently dominates the indie e-book market; it's certainly fair to say they are a major player.
But could they create a monopoly on books? Now, I have argued that Amazon poses no special threat to indie bookstores, but let's say I'm totally wrong. E-books get so fully adopted that you can't give your paper copies away, brick-and-mortar bookstores have nothing to sell, and they all go under--every last one.
On the Web, there is Amazon and...oh, there's Barnes & Noble and Smashwords and Google Books and the Sony Reader store and Kobo and the iBookstore. Oops.
Not a monopoly.
No, you say, Barnes & Noble is going down! Well, OK, that leaves Smashwords and Google Books and the Sony Reader store and Kobo and the iBookstore.
Not a monopoly.
Plus, I could sell e-books from this Web site. You could sell e-books from your Web site. People kick up this huge fuss over Amazon's proprietary system of Mobi files and Kindle readers, but I can and do make my own Mobi files, I could sell them here if I wanted to, and Smashwords certainly sells them. It may be more convenient for someone to buy Mobi files for their Kindle on Amazon, but they don't have to.
Where are the barriers to entry into this market? You don't have to build your own bookstore chain; you don't even have to tangle with Ingram. Look at Smashwords, a company that began operations all of four years ago. They're not some huge corporate entity with phenomenally deep pockets--Mark Coker describes the company's financial backers as "me, me and me." And yet, there they are, reportedly profitable and also a major player in indie e-books.
How could Amazon create a monopoly? They could try underpricing everybody, selling books at a loss, and that might work...for a little bit. Drive Smashwords under, though, and another will take its place, because the barriers to entry are not that high and there's money to be made off indies.
Amazon could also turn on authors, demanding exclusivity and offering increasingly-crappy royalties in exchange. That would require them to believe that people buy books on Amazon because they're on Amazon--not because they're written by an author the reader likes. The problem with that strategy is that the authors could always say, "Screw you!" and offer their books elsewhere. That's actually kind of what the traditional publishers are doing right now, and I think that strategy would work for Amazon just as well as it's working for them.
The change to self-publishing and e-publishing isn't a simple exchange, where you swap one group of corporate overlords for another. It is a completely different ecosystem. It is technology at its most disruptive.
Read through chapter 16, tightening and fiddling. Looks pretty good at this point, but of course I may just be burnt out....
The Passive Guy does a great post on the economic advantages of self-publishing here, and in the comments M. Louisa Locke notes that you may be a good writer, but if you're traditionally published, good luck beating her sales, because her book is $10 less than yours (except she says it much more nicely).
So, I finished going over the epilogue, and now I'm giving it another read-over and then printing out the chapters to read as hard copy after I take a couple of days off to get fresh eyes. I've finished chapter 8.
This makes me glad I had a writers' group and a beta reader who haven't read the first book read the first few chapters, because to me, especially now, those chapters seem so slow because they contain so much exposition. But it's clearly necessary if you aren't profoundly familiar with the fictional world and the events of the first book. And you know, when I read out a series, I do just sort of skim over the exposition in the beginning, but it's not like I resent it or anything--I know why it's there, even if I don't really need it.
...publishing gets really, really ugly. Watch out, people.
There's an interview with the publisher of Grand Central about how they really, REALLY care about their books, and do all sorts of wonderful things for them, and love and cherish their authors, and are just the best thing for writers.
It's very touching. You read it, and you wonder why anyone would self-publish. And then you read things by people who have been or who know people who have been published by Grand Central, and a rather different picture emerges. Crappy advances. Authors who are expected to do so much promotion they don't have time to write. Poor financial returns. Minimal and ineffective marketing.
Basically, the publisher of Grand Central has a fantasy about what the company is doing for writers. If you're trying to understand traditional publishing, a big part of the challenge is that the people in it tend to talk about what they wish they were doing. Very few people go into publishing because they want to get rich (and those who do are as dumb as rocks). The vast majority really and truly want to be contributing to literature and don't think they ought to worry about money. The rest are trying to rip you off.
Which is why they all lie about the bottom line--it's a culture that believes it is nobler than filthy lucre. That's why I saw an agent tell a roomful of writers that there was only maybe a tiny bit of truth in the notion that agents are interested in commercial books, when the truth is that any agent who wants to stay in business won't touch a non-commercial book with a ten-foot pole. That's why the nation's largest bookstore chain can tell implausible lies about market share, and everyone else in the industry backs them up.
The problem with this from an author perspective is that figuring out what you should do in traditional publishing is really difficult, because despite the pretentions it is still a business, and you can't make good business decisions without accurate information about how the money is made. And no one is willing to tell you that--they either want to believe the fantasy themselves, or they want you to believe it so they can steal from you.
What's really nice about someone like Joe Konrath is that he'll break down the numbers for you. But even if he didn't, or even if he was lying through his teeth, self-publishing is just far more transparent. The amount of money a writer makes off of, say, selling an e-book at a certain price on Amazon is public knowledge. It's why, if you're nosy like I am, it's so easy to do the math and figure out who's making what. It's why you can easily see what's a good deal and what's not. The information is there, it's verifiable, and you aren't reduced to taking the word of someone who has an agenda.
So I recently did a post about talking to readers about your book, and JW Manus did a post about it, too, that got picked up by Passive Voice and had some good comments.
And of course, we're all talking about how to communicate to readers what's in the book. And as Manus points out, you're also trying to entice readers. Manus writes:
What are readers getting excited about? Seriously, make a list of the buzzwords. Readers who liked those popular titles will be looking for similar titles to enjoy. To help them find yours, focus your book description on what the readers are actually looking for.
She's not talking about lying to people about what's in your book--that's going to backfire, badly. She's talking about figuring out how people who love books with X, Y, and Z in them figure out whether or not a book has X, Y, and Z. If your book also has A, some B, C, D, something between H and I, Q, T, and a little W, don't highlight that--it's too complicated for a description. Keep it simple: If you like X, Y, and Z, read this book.
In other words, you are designing a signal. You are creating a code.
When readers talk back, they also talk in code. Even if they don't know it.
"Not much happens" was a HUGE screaming signal that I had incorrectly positioned Trang as adventure sci-fi. It was not subtle to me, because I have heard many, many jokes made about people who don't like [INSERT CLASSIC OF ENGLISH LITERATURE HERE] because "nothing happens"--it's right up there with "Shakespeare uses too many big words" among Responses That Will Instantly Evoke Scorn Among the Literati. And it means something specific: It means that the reader likes plot and doesn't care about characters or prose.
I was lucky that that response was so stereotypical. I was also lucky that I have almost 20 years of making a living as a writer to give me confidence in my writing. I don't read something like that and think, "I have failed" or "I'm a bad writer." I read that and go, Oops! Better change the cover!
I think if that kind of review is going to make you extremely upset, insecure in your abilities, and (most important) like you don't want to write any more, and if you can't possibly control that response, then I guess you probably should refrain from reading reviews. But if you can take a step back, disconnect your emotions and your self-esteem from what is written, and read reviews for the feedback they contain about what readers were expecting and what they got, they can be very helpful.
Even when I receive positive reviews, I don't think to myself, Gee, I guess that means I can write! Of course I like getting those sorts of reviews--I'm not made of stone--but if I couldn't write, I would have starved to death back in 1992. What those types of reviews tell me is that 1. Trang is positioned correctly, 2. it will work as a loss leader, and 3. I better get Trust out, because people are waiting for it. That is all very useful and motivating information to have, but it doesn't change my opinion of my book or of myself as a writer.
I think the important thing to remember when communicating with readers is that there's no such thing as an empirically good book. It simply doesn't exist. I know someone who likes only political nonfiction, I know someone who likes only lesbian erotica, I know someone who likes only classical Greek and Latin literature. You could never, ever get those three people to agree on whether a particular book is good--it's just impossible. And you don't have to--you just have to make sure that your book on health-care policy, your story about nude cheerleaders who spank, and your translation of Euripides all wind up in the right hands.