If there were an award for expressing simple, obvious things in the most long-winded manner possible, I’d win it:

Aspiring writers of non-fiction, or of stories based on true events, might choose their subjects owing to the belief that if their writing concerns something which takes up considerable space in the public consciousness, then what they’ve written will be guaranteed a more successful debut in bookstores than it otherwise would be.

Or they might ride piggy-back on the prior successes of other writers or the public exposure of famous people. A biography of henry VIII sells more copies than a book about the life of Chelsea Brimrose, a girl known only to the author and a handful of friends, for example.

None of this really made an impression on me until last Winter Break, when I was reading a small book titled Godel’s Proof. It doesn’t consist of the impenetrable and lengthy mathematical derivations which constitute Kurt Godel’s hugely disrupting contribution to the math world in 1931. Instead, it’s an explanation of the proof for the layman. I don’t think I’ve ever read another book whose commercial success comes across as being so directly linked to the public’s prior familiarity with the subject.