Richard,
Nice link. The remarks on publication/broadcasting the discussions and feedback are somewhat relevant to you own thoughts on the differing response rates for certain topics.

I think many writers and booksellers have embraced the Public web for communication and personal/professional PR. There being more competition and the qualifications for success being as often about how loud the noise you make is rather than your talent they tend to make a degree of noise.

Science on the other hand has pretty stringent and pretty well defined parameters for success (even for entry). So the loudness of your shouting is largely irrelevant (not that it isn't sometimes helpful). The point being that embracing the Public web is not so necessary and therefore their noise less loud!

That's my theory for what it is worth.

I hate to bite... but since the overwhelming majority of our novels are debuts, I'm bloody glad that their average readership is higher than 500. There are three possibilities: either that's a suspect figure; most publishers are doing something wrong or we (alongside lots of other indie publishers I know) are doing something right. Discuss.

Well Richard does say average.

That hides considerable variation. Some do much worse others do considerably better. Equally I suspect (but do not know as I dont have the figures in question) that the figures in question exclude sales made by authors and quite a few independent book stores not to mention sales at launches etc.

Eoin

Multiply those 500 readers by the 2 million books in print and you may have the start of an answer to your question.

Multiply that £2000 by the number of independents in the country and you may even get another little piece of the puzzle.

And how much business does Macmillan do with the wholesalers (and consequently independents)? Perhaps another key to this tricky conundrum!

Emma/Eoin, I confess my average readership of 500 for a first novel is a guess but a reasonably educated one. Remeber I'm tlking readership not sales. Many sold books are read several times but many are never read at all. First novels include may 'vanity' published ones with hardly any readership etc. But even if I am wrong by 100% my argument still holds, I think.

Adam, If you multiply the fiction and bookselling stats as you suggest then you ahve to apply the same logic to scientific information thus maintaining the difference and my contention that we still live in a two cultures society. The stats are indicative not proscriptive. And you've managed to turn the argument back to the relatively trivial (and determined entirely by market forces) matter of whether independents are supplied directly by publishers or via wholesalers. Bah!!!

It`s because people who are scientists/interested in serious science are not interested in publishing so wouldn`t read a blog like yours. Unless they are other science publishers. All the scientists I have ever known in my entire life - not a huge number but enough and going back hundreds of years - have never been interested in anything other than science with a bit of sport and current affairs thrown in.

(Disclosure: I wrote the blog post that Richard links to above and co-organised Science Foo Camp. I'm also a Nature Publishing Group, and hence Macmillan, employee.)

I take Richard to be asking not 'Why don't scientists show an interest in my blog?', but rather 'Why don't (book) publishers take an interest in science?'. Susan's comment implies that only scientists are interested in science, which is probably true but no less tragic for that.

I couldn't blame anyone for being indifferent to publishing any more than I could blame them for a lack of interest in steelmaking -- it's just an industry after all. But anyone with half a brain and an ounce of curiosity, whether a publisher or something else, ought to have an interest in science (as well as literature, music, philosophy, technology and history).

Whatever your area of expertise, if you don't understand Darwin then you don't understand fully what it means to be human. If you don't appreciate Einstein then you don't appreciate the wonder of the universe we inhabit. And if you haven't read up on Godel's Theorem (arguably the most profound discovery a human mind has ever made) then you have a gap in your experiences the size of a Beethoven or a Shakespeare. If I -- a humble neurophysiologist -- can subscribe to the Literary Review and read the works of Joyce then any publisher can occasionally digest the contents of Nature (or, if you must, some other scientific publication).

Funnily enough, the single greatest personal discovery that I made at SciFoo was just how much the invited writers -- in particular, a small posse of eminent science fiction authors -- added to the debates. Perhaps their eloquence and originality shouldn't have surprised me (though it did). But most of all I was taken aback by the depths of their insights. I'm no particular fan of sci-fi, but I am now a fan of those authors. They showed, among other things, that it's possible to hold a fascination for both reason and its artful expression; that a true love of knowledge doesn't stop at arbitrary borders; and perhaps that ignoring the very idea of 'two cultures' makes for a more complete and interesting human being.