Having spent most of this year looking for who is to blame for the state of today’s book market and the lamentable fate of authors, nobody was more surprised than me to find out that I was at least partly responsible. Still, thankfully you can’t prove anything these days, least of all my arguments.
I want to blow my mind with a book, but the publishing world is consistently offering me the literary equivalent of aspirin. Unfortunately, what I want doesn’t seem to fit into those narrow marketing categories which now dictate everything we read. Don’t they know that the biggest blockbusters of the last few decades didn’t fit in either, and that’s kind of the bloody point?
Tara Sparling writes 