Book Gloom

I had a chat with my agent yesterday. I asked her what sort of books publishers were investing their shrinking advances in these days. Chick lit, nasty crime and misery memoirs, she replied. We chewed this over for a while. We agreed that there is good chick lit and bad and that the same goes for nasty crime (I have no view on misery memoirs except that I don't want to read them). We made an analogy with Top 40 music: some of the worst pop ever has been devotedly commercial and formulaic, yet so has some of the very greatest. We were as one in knowingly observing that identical packaging can conceal novels of very different calibres. Having these views in common cheered us up a bit. Even so, by the end of our chat I'm not sure which of us was more depressed.

Comments

[Noosa Lee]

Hi Dave

I don't get this at all. In the last month I've read four books in a row, (all published since 2003), that skipped about in different time frames. I didn't plan it that way, honest guv.

None of them fall into the above categories. Two of them ('The Sea House' by Esther Freud and 'Putting out the Stars' by Roisin Meaney) sold moderately well. Of the other two - 'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and 'Cloud Atlas' by David Mitchell was short-listed for Man Booker and won the Richard and Judy gong for 'Best read of the year'.

I would class all of them as literary fiction. 'Cloud Atlas' is a very challenging book as it requires the reader to follow many peoples' stories over five time zones and five hundred pages. With each voice, the reader must get used to a whole new language and world view. Mitchell even stops mid-sentence to move onto a new phase. But this was a popular book.

Chick lit? Misery memoirs? Aren't they so last century since Bridget Jones retired from singletondom and James Frey was discredited? Crime fiction will always be popular but that's genre, right?

Your agent might need to buck up her ideas because if no new good books are being published, there are plenty of back catalogue masterpieces for us avid readers to get our teeth into. I bought all the above books at the Oxfam bookshop in Redbridge.

xxx

Pants

[Littlebear]

You could very easily do excellent chick lit. In ‘The Adoption’, you ‘got’ how women think embarrassingly well. That bit about the hair attractively spread out was annoyingly accurate. I actually paused my read to think that through. You must have many sisters, or something.

[Dave Hill]

Well, thanks LB.

MsP. Lots of different types of book get published but the sort publishers are keenest to invest money in are the types my agent described - she should know, her living depends on it. The moral of the story is that publishers are increasingly reluctant to risk paying decent sums for anything that doesn't fit into an established market niche. Some such books do catch on in sales terms, but most don't.