Icelandic authors write for an audience of roughly 360,000 people

From Dispatches From a Microlanguage: An Icelandic Reading List by Thora Hjörleifsdóttir, translated by Larissa Kyzer.

A few years ago, I posted about the Icelandic book culture in The “jólabókaflóð,” which means Christmas book flood.  

From Dispatches:

Icelandic authors write for an audience of roughly 360,000 people. They are, in many ways, hopeless romantics, writing in a tiny tongue that both matters immensely and not at all.

If these authors had spent any time studying economics, it would’ve been obvious that it doesn’t pay to invest time and effort writing in Icelandic; no matter how well written the book, the market’s so small that there’s practically no chance of anyone turning a profit. As an Icelandic artist, the message or impression you want to convey will—best-case scenario—reach about 1,000 people at most. The economist would no doubt advise you to keep your day job and buy an internet advert to make said impression.

Even so, because almost no artists in Iceland are making any kind of monetary profit, our society is full of people who make art for art’s sake. My ear doctor, for example, translated Dante’s Inferno. My daughter’s music teacher is a singer-songwriter who’s toured around the world. Beyond the pleasure of having created something beautiful and maybe helping them get laid, people have pretty modest expectations about what their art is going to do for them, materially speaking. Sure, there’s a select group of Icelanders who manage to live off their art, but for a big part of society, art is a side gig. The everyday is full of inspiring—and inspired—people who are just living the daily grind; we meet in kindergarten coat rooms and slurp weak coffee at the mechanic’s, we worry about bills and pandemics and our relatives’ twilight years.

It is all about culture.

There was a few years ago, and presumably still today, a big movement in children's book publishing to publish more minority authors and in particular, more African-American authors.  It always struck me as thrice ill-advised.

One argument for the preferential affirmative action was that minority children needed to see themselves in the literature.  A profoundly emotional appeal but empirically and philosophically unsupportable.  Children are rarely as racist as their elders, particularly if their elders are critical race theorists.  

There is no evidence that children either choose or are benefitted by reading characters who "are like them."

If you ask any well-read child by the time they are ten or fifteen who their favorite characters in books are, you will rarely find a close match between the characters and the readers.  Very, very few people in the world are young Swedish girls (Pippi Longstocking); Very, very few people in the world are young English girls of the manor (Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden); vanishingly few are orphans (a way over-represented class in children's literature.)

Children love classic characters regardless of sex or race or class or language or national origin.  

Similarly there is no empirical evidence that children are benefited by being forced to read about characters "like them."  If you think about it, likely the reverse.  Reading about characters different from yourself but with whom you have sympathy, respect and admiration is likely contributive to a more open-minded view of the world.  

Which goes to the second argument for this affirmative action push.  Writing is a fickle and precarious field, one of the most winner-take-all contests of all professions.  The top 1% garner 95% of the revenue.  Most everyone else ekes out a small supplement to their income selling fewer than 200 copies in the first year of a new book and fewer than 1,000 copies over a lifetime.  

Why would you subsidize and attempt to entice people into such a precarious field?

The third argument is that of market size.  The claim is that the African-American literary market is simply too small for African-American writers to be successful.  

Looking at the empirical measures, this always seemed to me both marginally right and materially wrong.

Materially wrong because the habit of reading and book-buying among African-Americans seems to be markedly lower than in other groups and because - there are 42 million African-Americans.  That's a bigger market than all but German, Britain, France and Italy and about the same as Spain.  All the rest of the countries in Europe have lively literary sectors despite small or even, as in the case of Iceland, tiny populations.  

This article on Icelandic reading habits reinforces that culture shapes reading dispositions far more than financial viability or even absolute size of the market.