Lloyd Lofthouse

Something else that effects books sales is political beliefs? There are many nonfiction books written for both conservatives and liberals. Every week when I shop at Costco, I see them on the book table and ignore them.

But what about Fiction?

Archive.Newsmax.com says, “The average self-identified conservative book reader consumes about the same number of books per year (eight) as the self-identified liberal (nine).”

However, in another survey, the results show only 12% of readers were far-right conservative Republicans while 19% were far-left liberal Democrats. Source: Surveys.ap.org

In fact, About.com posted a list of novels conservative should read and listed Animal Farm by George Orwell; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand; The Red Badge of Courage by Steven Crane; Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; On the Road by Jack Kerouac; The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne, and Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.

Another site, Why Pop Culture Matters, says Science Fiction is Inherently Conservative: “One place where conservatives–and particularly libertarians–do pop culture well is in the science fiction field. Authors like Sarah Hoyt, John Ringo, David Drake, and even Harry Turtledove produce excellent writing in the Robert Heinlein vein, which leans libertarian-right. And John Barnes is very capably reprising the brilliant Heinlein juvenile novels of the 1950s in a twenty-first century style.”

I went in search of a list of fiction  for liberals and ran into a conservative firewall of hits attacking liberals as evil and the force that will destroy America.

I did see something about a liberal bias in zombie fiction. I also saw hits criticizing Hollywood for churning out too many movies with liberal themes/topics. After looking at the first hundred hits, I started to try other Google search terms until I found this at the Democratic Underground listing a few authors recommended for liberals: John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Phillip K. Dick for Science Fiction, etc.

What I did learn was that Conservatives are obsessive about the dangers liberals pose to America, but in the US, according to Gallup.com, twenty-one percent of Republicans are hard-right (17.2 million) while only 9% of Democrats are hard-left or very liberal (3.78 million), which may explain why liberals appear to be outnumbered by conservatives on the Internet.

However, normal conservatives (not the hard-right kind) make up 32.4% (64.8 million) of the adult population, Moderates 36% (72 million) and Liberals 21% (42 million). If we subtract the 3.78 million hard-left liberals, that leaves 38.2 million normal liberals.

Now that we have a better idea about the size of the reading public and its reading habits, how does an author go about attracting the right sort of reader to his or her work?

Answer: Building an Internet platform that attracts readers interested in a specific topic, genre and theme.

But, how does an author do that properly?

Continued on September 1, 2012 in Authors Finding Readers – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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