Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Thursday, January 13, 2011
The bursting of a bubble?
A year ago in comments, Ajay noted that the people who "spotted the Misery Memoir trend" were the John Paulsons and Nouriel Roubinis of the publishing industry. But has the wave crested? I was in Waterstones this afternoon and saw that the section formerly known as "Tragic Lives" had been rechristened "Painful Lives" (possibly because of the ambiguity of "tragic", leading customers to expect to find copies of A Man Called Gove, What Delingpole Did Next and Melanie Phillips: Jokes My Mother Told Me). Not only that but it had been reduced to a single shelf, at ground level underneath the True Crime section. In related news, "Dark Romance" no longer has its own separate category and has been folded into "Dark Fantasy", the consequence being that the total volume of vampire-knobbing books has shrunk and science fiction claimed some of its space back.
Question for home study: Of course, these two genres were spotted as a result of a couple of individual publishing sensations (Twilight, and A Boy Called It). In an alternate universe, where Stephanie Merritt and Dave Peltz's success was instead enjoyed by Ian McEwan, what do you think Waterstones would have called the genre established by knock-offs and pastiches of Saturday and On Chesil Beach?
this item posted by the management 1/13/2011 02:18:00 PM
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