At the moment, all we seem to hear about is how people mis-concieve chick lit, and this isn’t help by articles in the press such as Polly Courtney’s now infamous sacking of her pbulishers HarperCollins as she felt her books were being wrongly branded. However, we have a very steady and high number of visitors to this website, and there are a lot more chick lit bloggers out there too which suggest that the demand for ‘chick lit’ is still out there. However, the facts seem to show that there is sadly a decline in the sales of this type of fiction, and you have to wonder how much of it is due to the slating of the genre in the press, and even writers themselves disliking being classified under the chick lit umbrella. Yet despite this, endless chick lit novels achieve huge success, and quite a few lately have been turned into successful movies too: Emily Giffin’s ‘Something Borrowed’, Karyn Bosnak’s ‘What’s Your Number’ and Allison Pearson’s ‘I Don’t Know How She Does It’.
I found an interesting article on The Bookseller website this morning , about how women’s fiction isn’t selling as well as it used to, including big names like Marian Keyes and Jodi Picoult, with the top 20 women’s fiction authors selling on average 10% less this year than they did on their last title. However, can it just be attributed to the fact people haven’t got the spare cash to buy books? Or are women buying books on electronic reading devices such as Kindles, so they don’t have to be seen reading chick lit in public? I personally don’t understand some people’s issues with reading chick lit in public, Sophie Kinsella, Marian Keyes et al. are all hugely popular - why should I feel bad reading them because they have pretty covers? I don’t, I never have and I never will. So is the problem therefore down to the publishers and the way they have been marketed? Surely, they know their business and what sells, and it its worked well in the past, why change something if it isn’t broken?
So do you think that there is a downturn in women’s fiction, and if you do, why? Do you want your chick lit to be packaged differently, just changing what’s on the outside, and not on the insisde? I personally think that I definitely don’t want to see it being changed, and from seeing the activity we have on our website here, our Twitter feed where we are always asked for recommendations of chick lit to read and on our Facebook page, where lots of people still seem to be saying they are buying new releases when we post our photo albums of any given month’s releases, and women still seem to be excited for it. I’m always seeing on Facebook and Twitter that authors have sold rights to their books to many foreign countries, so there’s clearly still a global appeal for this type of fiction too. However, when you have women complaining to WH Smith about a problem with a ‘Women’s Fiction’ section in their stores, you have to wonder what we’re up against. We can spread the word about fantastic authors and books, but some people are so blinkered they don’t want to listen. I for one, and Leah, Danielle and all of our readers too are proud chick lit lovers, and hopefully as long as there is a demand for this fiction, it’ll continue to be written, published and loved!
Long live Chick Lit!
Article on The Bookseller mentioned in this article: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/womens-brands-hard-hit-downturn.html
A Scandalous Secret by Jaishree Misra
