“The publishing giant Vintage Press saw that number and realized there was a huge, previously-unrealized demand for stories like this.”
It’s the “previously-unrealized demand” that I simply don’t understand here. The numbers for romance novels took seconds to look up.
74.8 million people read at least one romance novel in 2008. (source: RWA Reader Survey) with an estimated $1.350 billion for 2013. If the author did indeed write 120 chapters, it shows that the author has the ability to produce for the publisher. Taken together with the above average number of online readers, I can’t see how this was a case of pulling the wool over the publishers eyes so much as the publisher being particularly good at finding material for their readers.
To me, it seems the demand was being realized just fine.
Hi, I’m Ian. I am a 32 year old computer programmer from Massachusetts. My main interest (in computer science) is in the realm of computational creativity but is by no means my only interest. For half my life, I’ve been coming up with my own sets of ideas—way back when it was on Usenet—some ideas better than others. Regardless of the eventual proven validity of my ideas, I find coming up with original ideas one of the primary motivators in my life. It is an exercise that allows me to continuously uncover beliefs and feelings and uncharted territory that wouldn’t be possible for me to explore otherwise. Also, I find it remarkably difficult to find people to share and dissect my ideas with. Generally, people either tell me that I’m smart (I’m not particularly smart) or weird (I’m not particularly weird). In either case I find most people also don’t want to continue talking about why wasabi and thunder are the same thing...or the relationship between creativity, intelligence, primes and small worlds...or why there is no such thing as a question...or why I’m a non-practicing atheist at the moment. What I hope to get out of this community is disagreement, agreement, new ideas, a reshaping of old ideas, friends, and above all, to know that other people in this world understand my ideas (even if they disagree with them). I hope to give this community some ideas they have never thought of.