Genre Fever
Genre fever is with us again striking diverse corners of the literary community with its confounding blend of marketing jargon, uncomfortable truth and misleading labels, all designed to make life easier for the known consumer, a person who does not exist, but is nevertheless the gleam in the eye of publishers large and small. The known consumer, the KC, fits the following profile: he or she reads books, but does not know how to distinguish between them. KC is adrift in a sargasso sea of choices with Oprah as a kind of Lighthouse at Alexandria, a beacon in the darkness. But Oprah has crashed to the seabed, done in by the marauding Prince James. Our world is now dark.
KC is on their own. Whether strolling the wide open spaces of Walmart or the cagey confines of an indy bookstore they are left to their own devices, picking up books at random; books about relationships, weight loss, romance, suspense, politics, horticulture, music, critical tomes, pink ones, green ones, black ones. KC is looking for escape or knowledge or, heaven help them, redemption between the covers. Suffering from genre fever KC staggers into the daylight with a cartful of purchases designed to enhance their lifestyle, feed the kids, groom the dog, products whose purpose and utlity are obvious.
KC is a moving target, no pun intended. Casual readers, serious shoppers. There are many millions of them, all impervious to marketing efforts by publishers. They are not book lovers. KC buys three books a year two of them gifts one of them by Doctor Phil. Chasing KC is what is known as dumbing down; if we produce work that is shoddy enough, KC will reward us. KC will buy books. The light will shine again.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:48 pm
You, of course, are based in Seattle, which is Reader City. Perhaps rather than trying to characterize the sporadic consumers of books, the publishing industry ought to study Seattle and decide how to turn the rest of the country into real readers.
Unfortunately, the answer is probably to increase vastly the number of rainy days everywhere else….
February 1st, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Daily rain. Pretty substantial.