Novel-reading has a dedicated audience numbering millions of people. But television and movies find fans in the billions. Books are hard to read and require a patience and imagination that few possess. A TV show is hypnotic, simple, and effective. Visual images like flashing light sabers in Star Wars or screaming jets in Top Gun: Maverick are more powerful than the written word, and easier to create. Television is all about staring at human beings yapping all the time. It is cheap to produce and generates its own hypnotic effect. Jeopardy! the quiz show is popular, but Wheel of Fortune always beats it. The stupid defeats the smart, the visual defeats the written word.

Books could be better, but it is immensely hard to write a gripping, readable book. Immensely hard. There is a glut of books on the market, and most books don’t sell even 5,000 copies. And yet there is a kind of justice in the book world, with the most entertaining books making it to the top tier. Linwood Barclay started out writing humorous crime caper books that didn’t sell. After a while, he shifted to something that worked and became a millionaire. If you don’t please the audience, you will be treated brutally. This is completely fair.

I was reading a Caucasian woman’s article on her career as a whore. This was in Toronto Life online. They called her a sex worker, but she really was just a plain old whore. Here’s a woman who has gotten too old to be paid for sex, trying to eke out a dollar selling her life story to idly curious gawkers in a mass market. She has no shame, and is desperate.

The woman in question is emblematic of the average writer, lacking talent to be gripping, approved of by the literary gatekeepers of New York to get published. Elmore Leonard, the crime and Western novelist, died a while ago and he said you should write for money. He wrote Westerns because in the 1950s, when he started, there were several magazines catering to that kind of thing. Then Westerns died and he switched to crime to survive. He was flexible enough to make it. Most writers are not that flexible.

Literary writers cannot write entertaining fiction to save their lives. Mass market writers like Stephen King wouldn’t understand literary fiction if it was programmed into their brains by a teaching machine for a thousand years, every day in a row beaming instructions into their inflexible heads. Almost nobody can turn on a dime the way Linwood Barclay and Elmore Leonard did. The writing industry is incredibly brutal. It makes the music industry look like child’s play.

My philosophy is that, given the difficulties of book reading, and the small size of the market except for the heavy hitters, you should not attempt to become a writer unless you know you are very good, as a clown, as a performer, as a whore for others’ imaginations. Yes, a whore. That Toronto woman who worked as a prostitute from her early university years was nothing compared to the whoring you’ll have to do if you want to become a popular novelist.

And you will be forgotten. Stephen King has written around 70 novels and only three will be remembered after he’s gone for a while. The Stand, The Shining, and ‘Salem’s Lot. And he was the biggest global author of the 1980s. John Grisham will be completely forgotten. James Patterson will be completely forgotten. Dean Koontz might be remembered for one Odd Thomas book. Maybe. You have to revel in your wealth and popularity while you’re alive and striking the iron while it’s hot.

Things get forgotten. George Lucas’s Star Wars has entered the culture on a permanent basis. In the entire 20th century, Elvis and to a lesser extent the Beatles will be remembered. Hitler will be remembered, and to a lesser extent Winston Churchill will be remembered. Franklin Roosevelt will be forgotten.

What do we remember of the Etruscan civilization that preceded Rome? They had books then, and all — every one — have been lost. The Romans didn’t have a printing press but certain of their works were preserved through the Dark Ages and Middle Ages such as historian Tacitus’s work, but nothing they did is read today except by classics professors.

Look at pornography. A million porn films have been made. Sexual activity on screen is one of the most hypnotic and riveting things you can film, and nothing stands out. The Golden Age of porn was when only a few companies such as Vivid Video in California were making it. Once everyone could afford a video recorder, there was an explosion of porn that blurred them all. The book industry is the same. Once mass literacy taught smart kids to write, half of them began sending their novels to New York and London. There is too much written material for sale and the majority of it is crap that hides the barely tolerable stuff. Yet the novel is so hard to make interesting, that television crushes it despite the low financial barrier to writing a novel and the meritocratic nature of becoming a paid author.

So many people say they want to write a book. Yet they have no skill and are too lazy to put in the hours even if they did. Yet book writing remains popular. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the bodybuilding lunkhead, wrote two books, Total Recall and Be Useful. I read Total Recall because I was bored. Nothing of it stands out in my memory a few years later. Be Useful can almost certainly be condensed to a five-page speech. Sir Patrick Stewart wrote a memoir called Make It So. Actors Tom Hanks and Keanu Reeves “wrote” books. Everyone wants to write, and everyone is cluttering about the market with crap.

Book writing has a cachet, when it should be ruthlessly curated and reduced to a profitable enterprise. There should be more emphasis put on entertaining, and more social rewards should go to the (male) authors who perform. You should get hot young pussy if you can write entertaining well. You should get social power. The rewards should be real and tangible.

Despite everything I’ve said, books have a unique kind of power that nothing else can duplicate. They have strengths that beat out television and movies, if handled correctly. The world of writing has been evolving for 500 years since the Gutenberg Press to a semi-entertaining form. The next hundred years should see a dramatic improvement in the quality of novels, as 20 or 50 writers learn from the best of the past — the J.R.R. Tolkiens, the Raymond Chandlers, the early Stephen Kings — and elevate their craft to the required high level to get a mass audience once again.