Dandelion Break Christmas cheer

[Mel L]

A cheery note for aspiring trad-published writers. The market may well be increasingly fragmented but
there is hope!

Fear Not: Publishing is Alive and Well — Yes, Even for Memoir and Literary Fiction

By Peter Mountford As 2024 draws to a close, I’ve been sifting through the stats on Publisher’s Marketplace for the year and am pleasantly surprised that SO MANY books have been accepted for public…

brevity.wordpress.com

 

[Pamela Jo]

One very unusual finding—a big change I noticed for 2024—was that the Literary Fiction category has, strangely, grown a lot. Literary fiction is supposedly a dead zone in publishing. Agents and editors constantly crow about how there’s no hope for literary fiction.

But in 2024 publishers bought 279 literary fiction titles (about the same as memoir). Up from only 74(!) such books listed on PM in 2022. This excludes many deals with small presses (my own forthcoming collection of stories Detonator sold to Four Way Books last year, and was never listed on PM).

Mel I wonder if Lit fiction is growing because it's coming to mean there is some quality control involved? Not jsut another cookie cutter genre story. Something that will make you laugh, cry, and be surprised by the ending for a change? Before anyone starts in -no not all genre is cookie cutter. I write genre, but then I go for an audience that goes beyond that genre too. And a reader who wants more from a book than another retelling of man with 1000 faces. Maybe I havent succeeded yet-but that is the goal. And that is the only kind of book I can really get stuck into. I think there is a category of readers who want that bit more.

 

[Mel L]

Mel I wonder if Lit fiction is growing because it's coming to mean there is some quality control involved? Not jsut another cookie cutter genre story. Something that will make you laugh, cry, and be surprised by the ending for a change? Before anyone starts in -no not all genre is cookie cutter. I write genre, but then I go for an audience that goes beyond that genre too. And a reader who wants more from a book than another retelling of man with 1000 faces. Maybe I havent succeeded yet-but that is the goal. And that is the only kind of book I can really get stuck into. I think there is a category of readers who want that bit more.

I agree with you, Pamelo Jo. As a reader who writes I don't have time to spend hours in a story unless the quality is there. Some literary fiction is way too literary for me, but I do want something that takes me above and beyond an entertaining read. I want the emotion but I also want to think. And as a writer, I too aspire to this but am far from hitting the mark. (Although the one agent who read through a previous memoir draft did say it had 'literary airs', which I found encouraging.)
OTOH, I wondered about that statistic. The criteria for defining literary fiction is qualitative, so how are they defining it? Could it have been broadened to include 'Up Market'? Or are readers, like you and me, simply becoming more selective? That would indeed be encouraging.

 

[Pamela Jo]

I think it means "Not going to win any pulitzers or Nobels, but it aspires to 'do better'." So it probably is a blend of upmarket and genre. As matt would point out, was probably written with language aimed at above 6th grade instead of the usual print 5th grade level.