Prophets of Doom

Kristin Nelson's blog recently mused on the decline of chick lit. She is having a difficult time selling it anymore:

I’ve been shopping a chick lit work now for several months—something that two years ago probably would have sold in a couple of weeks.

I'm surprised. Writers of historicals imagine all those chick-lit authors have it easy - dash off a 50,000-word book filled with white-space dialogue and emails, get a sassy cover, and watch the money roll in. Instant success!

We have this idea because we have been told, so often and long that it seems to be an industry joke, that the historical is dead. To quote:

Michael Norris, editor at Book Publishing Report, points to the money. "Historicals are struggling, with revenues dropping the last several quarters."

Anyone who writes historical has heard this at one time or another. According to the same article, part of the reason is quality:

"I've seen, literally, thousands of manuscripts," says editor Anna Genoese. "Only about 5% of the submissions have been historical—and only about half a percent of those could have been considered publishable. Creating a fantasy for readers to get lost in is one thing—electric lights in the Middle Ages is quite another."

So we're not writing 'em good enough - we're lazy and we write too light. Check. Write better historical. But wait:

"Look at what's going on in society today—so much tough stuff. Historicals in the traditional sense are so detail-rich and harder to read. People don't have time to work when being entertained."

That was Lisa Kleypas, people. OK, check. Write better historical with E-Z read Hooked on Fonix and no detail that is also true to history and intellectually stimulating.

No matter what kind of historical you end up with, you're damned by your format - because no one buys mass-market paperbacks anymore.

Mass market, the format of choice for historicals, is in decline across genres. Contemporary romances are more likely to be found in hardcover or trade paperback, the formats of choice for younger generations of readers.

Who are all these people with the bucks to spend twice as much for a trade paperback and $35 for a hardcover you can read in two hours? I don't know any. But this is PW, so they must know what they're talking about, and I'm not going to quibble. Which means I have to write something sold to younger audiences in trade paperback. Like, say... chick lit.

Only, not, right?

You can drive yourself crazy with this stuff. I think, from all this, that we're all supposed to be Linda Howard. Except we're not all supposed to be the same, because agents and editors are looking for variety! freshness! Something new!

And none of it matters anyway, because not only are chick lit and the historical dead, so is READING. Listen:

For the first time in modern history, less than half of the adult population now reads literature, and these trends reflect a larger decline in other sorts of reading. Anyone who loves literature or values the cultural, intellectual, and political importance of active and engaged literacy in American society will respond to this report with grave concern.

Even Linda Howard is in trouble, I guess.

I'm going to stop now, and hide in a corner with a Lymond Chronicle and a couple of Mary Stewart gothics. Because I need to escape the real world for a while, and I want to go to another time and place. And I don't want to pay a lot of money to do it. And if I'm lucky, by the time I'm a hundred I'll be able to write half as good as Laura Kinsale, who is a freaking genius and I don't care if it takes me a long time to read her books because that's what's great about them.

The pundits can go to hell.

Abby