The Hamster of Personal Aesthetic

The awesome Georgia McBride has posted her initial thoughts and reactions for the winning submissions of the St. Martin’s “New Adult” Contest. This is where I think publishing gets interesting, because Georgia sent me recommendations for submissions that didn’t interest me and I suggested a few that didn’t interest her either.

This is not the Hamster of Personal Aesthetic. This is Oruchuban Ebichu, the Housekeeping Hamster.

Wicked Cool Riley would say this is where the Hamster of Personal Aesthetic steps in. I’m not sure what the exact origins of the Hamster of Personal Aesthetic are, but suffice it to say, it involved a Kitchen Girls meeting in Lou Reed Girlfriend’s UWS apartment and a hilarious rodent impression. (Also involved: honeyed goat cheese and wine.)

What the Hamster of Personal Aesthetic says is, “Just because you wouldn’t read it doesn’t mean it’s not good.” The flip side of this is, “Just because you would read it doesn’t mean it’s good at all.”

Taste matters in this industry. Bear and I get into debates about this all the time because he asks why I would turn down something I don’t like that will make money.

The answer to that is 1) no one knows what will make money and 2) pure profit (however small) is not “making money”.

The point is, there is an actual objective idea of what makes a “good” book. Pacing, believable characters, evocative (but not necessarily descriptive)spare/lyrical/appropriately artistic prose styling, etc. As I said, you can always tell when something’s a good story well told. Unfortunately, until I sit down and finish a book from cover to cover, I will never know if it’s good or not. Even more unfortunately, I don’t have time to read every book in the world, published or unpublished.

This is where taste comes in and where publishing gets hard. On this side of the desk, we are trying to anticipate what people would pick up and read–what the broadest public aesthetic is. At the moment, it seems to be vampires. My Hamster of Personal Aesthetic is bored by vampires and has always been. He never liked Anne Rice and when TWILIGHT came around, he was slightly mystified. So when he finds a vampire book he DOES like and is interested in, then I know this is a book that will sell.

I have loved many a terrible book. FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC is one that comes to mind. The book is…not good. But it was cheesetastic with a forbidden romance that was simultaneously wrong but oh-so-right. I have also been unable to put down books that are outside my normal reading sphere and were also badly written. Dan Brown’s THE DA VINCI CODE is a prime example. I don’t knock its bestselling status; it sold like wildfire for a reason. I couldn’t stop turning its pages to see what happened next, even as I tore my hair out at the incorrect Spanish in the book. Where was production on this? Yes, it is literally correct to say Mi nombre es JJ. But Romance languages use the reflexive–in this case it should have been Me llamo JJ (I call myself JJ).

So when it comes to judging this past contest, I had to listen to my Hamster of Personal Aesthetic while trying to reconcile the notion of broadest commercial taste. It’s hard: I am not a reader of chick lit or thrillers or romance or a lot of women’s fiction. I like quirky, offbeat, postapocalyptic, fantastical, whimsical, and surreal fiction. Some of the submissions I chose, I would not have picked up in the bookstore.

But that doesn’t mean it might not be good.

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