Bestseller research
The aim of bestseller research is to make global statements about bestsellers in literature (in all media) as a cultural phenomenon.
history
As early as the 19th century, there were considerations in Germany that concerned the success of certain books . The result of these considerations was the question of what facts this success could be based on. However, the researchers who studied the phenomenon of successful books were not aware that it might be a completely new phenomenon or even a problem. Up until that time it was assumed that the success of a book resulted from its aesthetics, a consequence of the author's submission to a strict artistic code of values, which promised literary quality and high sales.
In June 1927, the article was published about success books and their audience by Siegfried Kracauer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . In this, the author argued that the sale of a book depends on the social conditions of the consumer and not, as assumed, on its content. The success of a book is therefore a “sign of a successful sociological experiment”. Furthermore, he saw the study of literary bestsellers as a means of researching the mentality of the middle class consuming them.
At the same time and in the decades that followed, authors in England and the USA also attempted to research and explain the phenomenon of the bestseller. The bestseller has been the subject of various scientific studies around the world since the 1970s.
However, the results of these attempts are too inconsistent to be brought into a general scheme for developing bestsellers. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the focus of these studies is mostly on the same points of view. The relationship between bestsellers and trivial literature is often examined, various production and sales strategies of book publishers or topics such as bestseller success and literary criticism. In this context, the bestseller lists, which have been established for many decades but have been criticized again and again, are often the focus of public interest.
The question of a "bestseller formula" is raised and whether "synthetic book successes" can be brought about by such a formula. But such an idea is rejected in serious bestseller research, because great literary successes, and even then only to a limited extent, can usually only be recognized as such in retrospect.
Problem areas of bestseller research
The culture-critical perspective - culture and bestsellers
This perspective reflects a growing fear among publishing houses and writers since the early 1950s of losing accepted bourgeois values that at times served as guidelines and foundations for the book market. As a result, there was a negative rating and strong criticism of bestsellers and bestseller lists. Werner Faulstich believed that he had proven the problems of the book market in 1974 in a study which, in his opinion, documents the upheaval in the British book trade. In his study, it says: "Book production is increasingly called bestseller production, and so the book, formerly an elitist work of art with a culture-bearing function, is becoming a cultural-industrial mass product which, with increasing scientific planning and standardization, is clearly becoming a bestseller." The short-lived American bestseller is In no way should it be seen as a model for the German book market, since the book as such should be valued and seen as a timeless work created to last.
According to cultural critics, it is important to research and promote the truly important works of our time, instead of, like many manager publishers, helping insignificant books to become bestsellers through heavy commercialization and book advertising. In the early 1960s , the writer Frank Thiess warned against "writings whose greedy reading destroys the sense of reality and leads to intellectual illiteracy".
In 1971, a journalist of the time began to publish a campaign against bestsellers, in which he described the collapse of the moral and value-conscious population and thus the certain ruin of the book market as a disease and sparked an important debate among researchers of the bestseller phenomenon.
The production-oriented perspective - bestsellers as innovations or schemes
Due to the strong debates surrounding the phenomenon of the bestseller, there was an increasing desire in the 1970s for studies based on empirical data. As a new central question, the importance of the bestseller within the entire book industry came to the fore. It was now examined which determinants could turn a book into a bestseller. Was it the literary quality of the text, the published name of the author, the blurb, the critic looking more closely at the book, or even the publisher and the special treatment that they might have given a book? The result of these investigations was, and still is today, that all these determinants do not help a book to become a bestseller, but can only have a supporting effect. The decisive factor for the success of a book is much more a “demand- and market-oriented production and [the] systematic promotion of an emerging chance success”. Another central point of production-oriented research relates to the literary and aesthetic quality of the books. In the 1980s, a clear distinction was drawn for the first time between colportal literature and bestsellers. A wide variety of studies had shown that the protagonists in the bestseller works referred to were “individualized, psychologically designed and socially contoured”. The subjects of the books were also relevant and relevant to society in the respective decade. In order to explain the success of a book, its consumers and their needs must always be taken into account. Bestsellers turned out to be works with a balanced balance between scheme and innovation, whereby innovation stands for new and originality and scheme for a "formulaic variation of the 'always the same'"
The reception-oriented perspective - social psychology of the bestseller
The reception-oriented perspective raises the question of what consumers expect from bestsellers of the product. Studies in this direction have existed in Germany since the 1930s, for example by Robert Neumann . As a result of this research it can be stated that a book should in its subject, the plot structure, the representation of its protagonists, its language and ideology be based on the expectations of the consumers and meet them in a positive sense. However, the needs of consumers cannot be linked to individual cases. Rather, a bestseller must appeal to the wishes and dreams of an entire class of society. It should also have an up-to-date reference to the time, since the readers of bestsellers, who mostly belong to the middle class, regard newly acquired knowledge from books as prestige.
The bestseller serves as a kind of dream factory for its consumers, which promises them relaxation from everyday life for a short while and thus also fulfillment.
The media-oriented perspective - bestsellers in media change
In the last decades the bestseller has developed from a phenomenon of the book market to a phenomenon of a supramedial and international culture. Where in the 1950s there was still a discussion of inter-media network types, this has changed since the emergence of other international and successful types of literature, such as feature films and television series . Since the 1970s, the connection between bestseller and film has been the focus of public interest. Marketing processes for literary bestsellers, films, soundtracks and merchandising goods have rapidly increased in importance and speed. Marketing campaigns are often started during the actual writing of a new bestseller, which should support the success of the book from the beginning. Bestsellers to which this applies are, for example, Joanne K. Rowling's Harry Potter books or Frank Schätzing's The Swarm . Both Harry Potter and The Swarm have achieved supramedial and international fame through clever marketing strategies in a very short time.
Such developments are viewed differently. Critics warn against leveling German literature by aligning it with the American bestseller culture; others see the development of the bestseller as positive.
literature
- Werner Faulstich : Inventory of bestseller research. Approaches-Methods-Income . Wiesbaden: 1983, pp. 70-193.
- Werner Faulstich and Ricarda Strobel : Bestseller as a market phenomenon. A quantitative finding on international literature 1970 in all media . Wiesbaden 1986.
- Wolfgang Ehrhardt Heinold: books and bookmakers . Heidelberg: CF Müller, 2001.
- Wolfgang Ehrhardt Heinold: books and booksellers . Heidelberg: CF Müller, 2001.
- Burkhart R. Lauterbach: Bestsellers: Production and sales strategies . Tübingen: * Tübingen Association for Folklore EV Schloss, 1979.
- Jörg Ulrich: Detectors write bestsellers , Ulm 2003.
- David Oels: bestseller. In: The book market book . The literary business in basic terms. Ed. V. Erhard Schütz u. a. Reinbek: 2005, pp. 47-53.
- Winfried Wehle (ed.): Italian bestsellers (Topic No. d. Ztschr. Italian No. 34). Frankfurt a. M. 1995.
swell
- ^ Werner Faulstich : Inventory of bestseller research. Approaches-Methods-Income . Wiesbaden: 1983, p. 77.
- ↑ Ernst Fischer: Bestseller in the past and present. In: Media Studies. A manual for the development of media and forms of communication . Ed. V. Joachim-Felix Leonhard u. a. Berlin: 1999, p. 774.
- ↑ Ingrid Tomkowiak: Focal points and perspectives of bestseller research. In: Swiss Archives for Folklore 99, 2003, p. 9.
- ↑ Tomkowiak, p. 8.
- ↑ Tomkowiak, p. 11.
- ↑ Tomkowiak, p. 12
- ↑ ibid