Ever feel like nobody’s listening to you? Ever feel like nobody understands how you FEEL? Well, maybe you need to get yourself a Women’s Fiction Husband (TM). They’ll understand you right off the page. Every home should have one!
…Or should it? What would this mean in terms of arguments? Spontaneity? Your couch? Your KITCHEN?
Imagine that you are a writer of romance. Sometimes steamy, sometimes so heart-breaking that grown men in their forties have scowled at you on the street. Then, imagine that all the people who don’t regularly buy books – which, in case you don’t know, is a far larger number than the book-buying public – think…
If Colm Toibín’s Brooklyn had been written by a woman, would it have been a smash hit? Would anyone have cared one whit for a story about a young woman and her domestic struggles, if that young woman had been created and written by another woman? No. They wouldn’t.
A few short years ago, when the world was gripped by the throat by an ugly global recession, as opposed to just gripped by the goolies as we are now, fantasy fiction took off like a rocket. When times are bad, it seems, people want to go somewhere else in their heads, and that somewhere…
It’s summer holiday season. Therefore it’s self-published e-book time. I’m currently loading up to my Kindle. But what makes me choose one non-traditionally published book over someone else’s? It’s tough to know which marketing works, and which doesn’t; as a reader, I have to say that I find a lot of book marketing intensely annoying, and at best…
Another day, another Guardian article. Don’t get me wrong. I love the Guardian’s Book section. It feeds me. But I don’t like it when it makes me feel guilty and ashamed. Especially when they’re right. Today’s offensive (i.e. read: far too close to the bone) article points out that there is no such genre as “women’s…
In this post (and, following some suspicious yoghurt, this one) I pretended to have a look at what was going to happen in 2014, but now I’d like to do it for real. What fads and fashions will we see in genre fiction in 2014? Will fantasy lose its dystopian and grimy-fingered grip on the bestseller market? And that age-old question –…
Or, as we in the business like to call it, “A Load of Charts”. It’s great seeing all the data like this. I could extract meaning from it all day and still not get bored. Bet you wish you were me. We are now, as promised, going to look at sales volumes, to see what they tell…
Tara Sparling writes 