Giving up books for Lent

Anna Baddeley

Wednesday, 22nd February 2012

More bad news for people who like their reading matter to come with a spine: January sales for printed books were down 16 per cent on last year's. There are lots of reasons for this — ebooks, better telly, a global pandemic of attention deficit disorder — but what’s often overlooked is modern publishing's tendency to value quantity over quality.
 
Over 150,000 books were published in the UK last year, an increase of nearly 50 per cent on a decade ago. Not all of this is down to the growth in self-publishing. The book industry appears to have taken trendy longtail theory — increase profits by selling less of more — and swallowed it the wrong way. Instead of covering several bases well, the plan seems to be cover every base with any old thing, preferably multiple times. Or rather, churn out as much as you can and hope the mysterious power of the backlist combined with a few surprise bestsellers means you’ll break even.
 
On Ash Wednesday, the bloated book industry needs to channel Alain de Botton and steal Christianity’s best idea: abstinence. In the spirit of temporarily religious schoolgirls and er, Jesus in the wilderness, I have proposed a forty-day fast from:

Debut novels with self-conciously quirky titles,
books about the Titanic,
books about Charles Dickens,
books about how the French are better than us,
the new Stieg Larsson,
the new Freakonomics,
the new Great American Novel,
books by Roberto Bolaño,
books by Peter Ackroyd,
biographies of dogs,
erotic memoirs,
memoirs about ageing,
erotic memoirs about ageing,
short stories,
books based on blogs,
books based on tweets,
books that try and make science sexy,
books that try and make economics sexy,
Victoriana,
novels that have been optioned by Ridley Scott,
literary pastiches/homages/reimaginings, upmarket misery memoirs,
upmarket kiss-n-tells (esp. by exes of Martin Amis),
books about Nazis,
novels about people writing novels,
novels by people under thirty,
‘long-lost’ novels by dead authors (esp. dead foreign authors),
novels with unreliable narrators,
Granta,
books where the author goes on some sort of quest,
books about being a middle-class ex-pat,
searingly honest memoirs that exploit the author's children,
novels narrated by an animal/chid,
books by pretty American girls who have got away with murder,
academic books packaged as popular non-fiction,
upmarket self-help guides,
books by disgruntled ex-military men,
novels with the subtitle ‘: a novel’,
novels with a colon in the title,
party-planning guides by royal sister-in-laws,
state of the nation novels,
coming-of-age novels,
upmarket chicklit,
memoirs of depression/alcoholism,
books where the author died halfway through that have been finished by someone else,
TV tie-ins,
film tie-ins,
children’s books written by celebrities,
worthy teenage fiction about ‘issues’,
the new Twilight,
enhanced ebooks and apps,
books where the author gives something up for a year (esp. sex),
novels over 700 pages,
novels over 400 pages,
books about Shakespeare,
books about the Beatles,
books about the true identity of Jack the Ripper,
books that began as magazine articles,
books by twenty-five-year-old Oxford grads who think they're the voice of the working class just because they're from Stockport,
post-colonial historical fiction,
cross-over fiction,
American pop sociology that gets turned into government policy,
the new nature writing,
non-fiction with one-word titles,
hybrid-genre non-fiction,
Oxbridge novels,
graphic novels,
books about the internet/financial crisis/politics that are out-of-date as soon as they are written,
new wave magical realism,
novels with text speak/flow charts/anything inspired by oulipo,
novels you need to read twice to 'get',
novels written for the Booker,
political diaries by wannabe Alan Clarks,
and most poetry.

Anna Baddeley is editor of the Omnivore.

Blog Tags: Fiction , Literature , Non-fiction , Publishing