Fiction Still in Death Throes, Thanks for Asking

Kristin Tillotson of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune falls back on one of the most widely disseminated publishing industry clichés of the last decade: hardly anybody buys fiction anymore. As usual, 9/11 is cited as a motivating factor, what with people wanting to learn about the Middle East all of a sudden, along with the hotly contested Gore-Bush election (we like it when pundits reaffirm our political beliefs) and the Y2K transition (actually, I don’t get this one, but it might be some NewAge-y thing). Oh, and nonfiction is more media-ready, too. One bizarre twist: Instead of relying on Nielsen Bookscan for sales figures on the new novels from John Updike, Salman Rushdie, and T.C. Boyle, Tillotson turns to…Ron Charles of Washington Post Book World. (I imagine that’s largely so she can then quote him uttering the standard line about how book success is pretty minor compared to just about any other branch of the entertainment-industrial complex.)

Never mind all the contradictory evidence—Patterson, Grisham, and Cornwell “also continue to sell more than a million copies of each new hardcover”*, and “literary commercial fiction sells better than any other genre” in paperback—if Jonathan Franzen is writing a memoir, the novel’s gotta be on its last legs, right? Except, of course, that people still want stories, blah blah blah… Oh, and look at all these big-name writers with novels coming out in the fall. That last banal observation includes one of the worst sentences I’ve seen in industry reporting this year:

“Charles Frazier, whose debut Cold Mountain won the National Book Award in 1997, has finally heaved forth his second novel, Thirteen Moons.”

Ewwwwwwww.

* It’s unclear whether Tillotson is referring merely to all the books that only have James Patterson’s name on the jacket, or if she’s including the ones that actually credit co-writers. Also, I bet J.K. Rowling outsells all three of them.

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