Are Non-Readers Too Busy to Read, or Are the Wrong Books Over-Promoted?

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why so many people don’t read books.

The usual explanation is that people are too busy. Others argue that phones and social media have destroyed our attention spans. Both explanations probably contain some truth, but I suspect there is another possibility that we don’t talk about very often. What if the problem isn’t simply that people aren’t reading, but that we aren’t always putting the right books in front of the people who aren’t?

Whenever I walk into a bookshop, I’m reminded just how much variety there is. Some books are beautifully descriptive, lingering over places, landscapes and tiny details that many readers genuinely enjoy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that style of writing. In fact, I understand why people love it. But over time I realised it wasn’t the kind of book I wanted to write.

When I eventually sat down to write No, I Won’t Buy You a Drink!, I made a conscious decision not to package the world around me. During my travels I certainly visited remarkable places, but the places themselves were rarely what stayed with me. Long after the buildings, monuments and landscapes had faded from memory, I still found myself thinking about the conversations I’d had, the misunderstandings that taught me something, the kindness of strangers and the countless ordinary moments that quietly changed the way I understood people.

There are already thousands of books that can describe famous landmarks more beautifully than I ever could. I wasn’t trying to compete with them. I simply wanted readers to stay on the journey with me, moving naturally from one experience to the next without feeling that the scenery had become more important than the people standing in front of it.

As I was writing, another thought kept returning to me. We often assume that people who don’t read are somehow different from people who do. We tell ourselves they’re too busy, too distracted or simply not interested in books anymore. Yet many of those same people will happily spend hours watching documentaries, listening to podcasts, following long conversations online or losing themselves in a good story on television. That made me wonder whether the problem might not be stories at all.

Perhaps there are plenty of books that non-readers could enjoy. Perhaps we’re just not doing enough to put those books in front of them.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered about the people already inside the reading world. Books are naturally promoted, reviewed and discussed among passionate readers, and there is nothing surprising about that. They are the people most likely to follow authors, visit bookshops, read reviews and talk about what they’ve just finished. Some might read twenty or more books a year, so they are already very good at finding books when they want one.

But if we keep promoting books primarily within that audience, we may simply become better at selling more books to people who already read a lot of them. The people who read one or two books a year, the people who used to read regularly, or the people who would like to read but rarely find the opportunity may be much harder to reach.

That doesn’t mean the books being promoted are bad books, or that people who read twenty or more books a year are somehow the wrong audience. They are an important part of the reading community. It simply makes me wonder whether the books receiving the most attention are always the books most likely to bring someone who rarely reads back to the page.

When I was writing my memoir, I wanted to see whether I could create something that someone who rarely picks up a book might still enjoy. That didn’t mean simplifying the ideas. It meant communicating them as clearly as I could. I wasn’t trying to impress readers with elaborate descriptions or literary flourishes. I was trying to make the writing feel like a conversation with someone sitting across the table, allowing the ideas to emerge naturally from the journey instead of asking readers to admire the writing before they experienced the story.

The irony is that books are usually reviewed by passionate readers, which is perfectly reasonable. They’re naturally comparing one book with another, judging style, structure and literary technique. Sometimes, however, that can also mean a book is judged by what it deliberately chooses not to do. If an author strips away some of the traditional packaging, it can appear that something is missing, when in reality the simplicity is intentional.

Looking back, I don’t think the question is whether people still enjoy stories. I think they do. The better question may be whether we’re putting enough attention into reaching the people who would like to read, rather than continuing to concentrate on the people who already do.

Perhaps non-readers aren’t broken. Perhaps they’re not simply too busy. Perhaps we’re just very good at putting books in front of people who already know how to find them.

If that’s true, maybe the answer isn’t writing books differently, and it certainly isn’t telling people who already love reading that they are reading the wrong books. Maybe it’s thinking differently about which books we promote, where we promote them and who we are trying to reach.

There are millions of people who may not read twenty books a year, or even five. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t enjoy stories. It might simply mean that the right book, at the right time, hasn’t found them yet.

Topics:

#MemoirWriting #WritingPhilosophy #AustralianAuthor #TravelMemoir #NonReaders #Books #Observation #Authenticity #DJGifford #NoIWontBuyYouADrink