You're All Different. You're All Individuals.

Except it's not true. None of us really are.

Booksellers make money because our mental, physical and behavioural similarities outweigh our differences by a wide margin. A novel and its characters can appeal to many different people, even if those readers outwardly present as (and usually insist on) being very different with regard to only a few specific traits - be that skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, or whatever else is thought worthy of individual distinction, attention or often deliberate, rancorous and unnecessary division.

“The vast majority of variation occurs within groups;
very little variation differentiates between groups.”

This statistical surety which marketing folks rely on is similar to how most genetic variation occurs within populations, not between them, no matter if you define a population by geography, ancestry, race or any other measure. We are far (99.9% far) more similar to each other than we care to admit.

Booksellers know this. And so do authors. But a specific group of contemporary, self-enlightened readers? Not so much. They like being different. Different is good. It’s tribal; it’s partisan; it can help them stand out in any madding, media-obsessed crowd.

But there’s now a difference emerging that every previous blossoming of kidulthood didn’t exhibit. They want their ubiquitious ‘uniqueness’ to be stretched across everything they do, see, hear and read. And they want the people who help make that difference so very real to them, to also live it in thought, word and deed. They want their bubble to be an all consuming closed loop of recyclable safe space. The fact that there are millions of such bubbles, all overlapping by 99%, all jostling to join the ever lengthening – eventually meaningless – acronyms of inclusivity, doesn’t enter into their reasoning.

This could be seen as a writer’s nightmare, far beyond the usual pen-wringing; a publisher’s impossible conundrum on commercial differentiation; or a panic-stricken PR problem. But it’s not really. The remedy is quite simple…