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This is going to be a thread because I am pissed and have too many words for a single tweet.
If you read genre fiction, especially if you are an independent bookseller, please read on and join me in my anger.
If you read genre fiction, especially if you are an independent bookseller, please read on and join me in my anger.
I am in the process of going through Spring catalogs to order books for the store. In the @HachetteBooks "stub" catalog for their transition from two to three seasons, I ran across this gem.
"This is what we always hope genre fiction will do: transcend the genre and become literature" in the markups for the paperback of @nkjemisin's #TheCityWeBecame. It is a quote from one of the HBG sales reps (not mine, thankfully).
While I am not surprised--publishers in general, and Hachette in particular, often have a less-than-ideal attitude toward genre fiction--I am still incredibly angry and disappointed.
This attitude, that genre fiction is "not literature" and somehow needs to "transcend genre" to be something "more," something worthy of respect, is pervasive. And it's wrong and it's disrespectful to the books and their authors and their readers.
Indie bookstores have long had a reputation for being unfriendly to genre fiction in general (Romance in particular, but that's a whole other rant.) and statements like this, by someone who is selling these books *to independent bookstores* reinforce that.
Statements like this encourage those bookstores already resistant to anything that is not Lit-er-a-ture to continue in their dismissal. The publisher thinks it's lesser, so it must be.
Publishers, in turn, then claim that indies don't want genre fiction; that it's not worth their time to market these books to the indie channel. It goes round and round and round, with each side feeding the other.
The result being that wonderful, immersive stories get overlooked and passed over because they are being marketed as something other than capital-L Literature.
Booksellers like me, who read genre fiction almost exclusively, are left feeling like we are not "real" indie booksellers because the books we enjoy reading and selling are not "important" enough.
But I have been reading and handselling Jemisin since The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was released. I read an ARC of that first book and knew it and she were something very special indeed.
I am so, so happy that others are finally joining the party, but it's taken the rest of y'all YEARS to get here because her books are S-F/F and so you all but ignored them for years.
How many other authors don't even get the chance to grow their careers because they write genre fiction and so don't get the support and sales necessary for publishers to consider them worth the investment?
Worse yet, how many great books are you missing out on reading because they have dragons or spaceships or kissing on the covers?
Just stop. Stop dismissing genre fiction as something "less than." Stop confusing snobbery with erudition. Stop claiming that "genre fiction doesn't sell" for you/in indies if you won't even try. A good writer and a good story are good, no matter their trappings.
Not everything needs to be "literature" to be of value, so please stop pretending it does. Find the value in the story for itself, not in how it compares to some construct you've created to define what is Literature. Please.
Just read a dragon/spaceship/kissing book. Enjoy it. Handsell it. Allow yourself the joy.
