I don’t BookTok. I barely Instagram. I do have readers. Thank heavens for publicists, but nothing makes small press writers feel more inadequate than the latest fad that the big houses throw money at. We try to eke out money to hire our own publicists knowing we can never pay them enough. I understand why some young folks want to grow up to be influencers. Who doesn’t want to be courted?
This one caused me to think about why I feel so let down by the trope machine as a reader in the last several years. One, books that I'm expecting to be at least slightly literary, are more and more often turning out to be really a basket of tropes. This summer at my mom's house I came across a nice-looking hardcover that seemed appealing and was set in a small town in my region. My mom and I thought it would be a fun beach book about women's friendship with local setting appeal. The word literary was on all the jacket copy. And. it. was. just. too. tropey, even for my mom who has good taste but is less picky. It's maybe not even the tropey-ness, it's the absence of anything else. My other complaint is maybe another side of the same complaint, which is that even when I'm looking for a particular commercial genre that I have read a lot, it seems harder than it used to to find *good* ones. Even my kid, who reads kind of between middle grade and YA, is complaining that "these books are all the same." It's to the point where if I'm not buying a book from an independent or university press, I'm probably buying one that was published more than 10 years ago or (especially) first published outside the US. I guess what I'm saying is I like familiarity and commercial books sometimes, but I think big publishing is not doing this well.
As usual, you give us food for thought in your completely open, honest way. Thank you for that, and for always being open to the "peg that doesn't fit the hole". Those are books that I would like to read.
I don’t BookTok. I barely Instagram. I do have readers. Thank heavens for publicists, but nothing makes small press writers feel more inadequate than the latest fad that the big houses throw money at. We try to eke out money to hire our own publicists knowing we can never pay them enough. I understand why some young folks want to grow up to be influencers. Who doesn’t want to be courted?
This one caused me to think about why I feel so let down by the trope machine as a reader in the last several years. One, books that I'm expecting to be at least slightly literary, are more and more often turning out to be really a basket of tropes. This summer at my mom's house I came across a nice-looking hardcover that seemed appealing and was set in a small town in my region. My mom and I thought it would be a fun beach book about women's friendship with local setting appeal. The word literary was on all the jacket copy. And. it. was. just. too. tropey, even for my mom who has good taste but is less picky. It's maybe not even the tropey-ness, it's the absence of anything else. My other complaint is maybe another side of the same complaint, which is that even when I'm looking for a particular commercial genre that I have read a lot, it seems harder than it used to to find *good* ones. Even my kid, who reads kind of between middle grade and YA, is complaining that "these books are all the same." It's to the point where if I'm not buying a book from an independent or university press, I'm probably buying one that was published more than 10 years ago or (especially) first published outside the US. I guess what I'm saying is I like familiarity and commercial books sometimes, but I think big publishing is not doing this well.
As usual, you give us food for thought in your completely open, honest way. Thank you for that, and for always being open to the "peg that doesn't fit the hole". Those are books that I would like to read.