The Party’s Over
BEA is over. RT is over. For those who didn’t go to either, don’t know what BEA and RT are, and/or don’t care…well, today’s just another Monday.
For the “it’s just Monday crowd” I give you this on literary fiction. Historical romance writers complain about a shrinking market. Lest you think literary fiction gets all the review space, there is an essay in the New York Times Book Review as relayed by Publishers Weekly that suggests it ain’t that easy be literary either:
Rachel Donadio’s NYT Book Review essay takes on “the pride and joy of publishing, literary fiction,” which “has always been wonderfully ill suited to the very industry that sustains it. Like an elegant but impoverished aristocrat married to a nouveau riche spouse, it has long been subsidized by mass-market fiction and by nonfiction ripped from the headlines. One supplies the cachet, the others the cash.”
Janklow & Nesbit agent Eric Simonoff says, “It’s a zero-sum game and the publisher knows they can only push so many titles per season. There’s an enormous amount of internal triage that goes on. Rarely is a publisher surprised at the success of a work of fiction.”
But FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi counters, “A lot of preplanned successes turn out to be flops.” Donadio cites Benjamin Kunkel’s NYT-hyped INDECISION, selling 19,000 copies via Bookscan-tracked outlets, as “respectable…but disappointing for such a heavily promoted title.”
And agent Nicole Aragi remarks, “When I started, I used to think it was 80 percent hard work on the part of your author and 20 percent luck. Now, I think it’s 50 percent hard work and 50 percent luck.”
Donadio concludes: “It can become a vicious circle: publishers lament that literary fiction has trouble finding a foothold — then flood the market with overhyped and often derivative work in the hope of meeting some vague idea of reader expectations. In the end, what will rescue literary fiction from the crushing commercial demands of publishing today is exactly what has always sustained it: the individual writer’s voice. There is, after all, a difference between a reader and a market.”
Of course there’s a general pre-supposition that because something is “literary” (and therefore of “quality”) that it’s meant to sell a lot of copies in a short period of time, which literary fiction has rarely done.
Personally, I think the odd cover of Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision and the vast over-hype didn’t help. There is such a thing as too much hype. But, the point is the grass is not greener over there despite what we want to believe.
