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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33565 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I’ve brought up this point before, but what relation do those lists of ‘best new writers’ and awards and the like have to, well, sales?

My priors are distinctly that sales are dominated by 1) porn adjacent novellas and 2) James Patterson-esque high-volume authors with a dozen-odd ghost writers, with institutional sales in a distant third.

Obviously if the fashion in lit fic is to have books with emotions instead of plot, women will dominate the list of ‘best new writers’ compiled by lit fic reviewers. But it’s unclear to me that they can compete outside of that niche.

While I concur that sales are going to be decoupled from literary criticism, the list in question is from a lit-crit magazine. Lloyd is complaining that there’s no money in lit-fic, and only women can get reputation from it, so men wandered off.

emotion instead of plot

What do you mean by that? I don’t think of lit-fic as stereotypically emotional so much as…thematic. Technical. Willing to eschew a normal plot, but in service of conversations with other lit-fic, not “emotions.”

if the fashion in lit fic is to have books with emotions instead of plot

Notes from the Underground? Ulysses? In Search of Lost Time?

Plenty of classic literature is high on emotions and low on plot. There's no reason to assume that it's a naturally feminine domain. If anything, the most complex and probing investigations of human emotional life have been written by men.

Your priors are right insofar as fiction sales are dominated by romance (maybe unfair to class it all as porn-adjacent--there's a lot of romance without graphic sex scenes. It's certainly a very formulaic, paint-by-numbers genre tho even by the standards of genre fiction). Second-biggest I believe is mystery/thriller, though female authors predominate there too these days.

Here's the NYT bestsellers list.

I’m begging no one from my school sees this 😘😘 // #readingsmvt #bookslvt #LinkBudsNeverOff #smut #book #booktok #foru #foryou #foryoupage #page #waterstones #wattpad #crystal #spice #itendswithus #getmefamous

Is… is this what TikTok is?

TikTok's a pretty wide platform. It's like taking a post from /r/anime_irl and saying "Is this what reddit is like?". But I think there's definitely a large swath of tiktok like that

I thought tiktok was less literate... Shouldn't these short-form videos be attracting the lowest common denominator?

"Look, they're having sex in my book. Tee-hee I'm such a bad girl"

Seems very much to be a small but common denominator.

How is this a thing?

The pleasure of transgression?

Why wouldn't it be a thing?

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