Mayfly Marketing

How to sell your novel in a short-attention-span world.

- PAUL GOAT ALLEN

In the last 30+ years that I've worked as a book critic, the publishing industry has experienced some radical changes. The birth of digital publishing and the rise of e-books, the sad demise of independent and chain brick and-mortar bookstores, and the emergence of audiobooks have irrevocably restructured the publishing world.

But arguably the biggest transformation in writing and publishing fiction over the last few decades is more subtle and so much more profound.

It's the speed in which narratives progress, both in terms of content and structure. Everything is faster, more streamlined, built for those readers with the attention span of mayflies.

Welcome to the brave new world of instant gratification: SMS language, 280-character (or shorter) tweet lengths, and endlessly scrolling through Instagram Reels and TikToks, swiping after mere microseconds if the content isn't interesting in some way.

To the surprise of no one, our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and...

What was I saying again? The average human attention span decreased by nearly 25 percent from 2000 to 2015, shrinking from 12 seconds in 2000 to around 8 seconds in the mid-2010s.

For comparison, a goldfish's attention span is 9 seconds.

The reasons for this fleeting focus are myriad. A 2019 study from researchers at the Technical University of Denmark found that the inundation of information bombarding those living in a digitalized world has profoundly narrowed people's attention spans.