Page 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 - Next

AE: How are these "gaylit" novels doing, commercially?
BH: A regular book can sell like three to six thousand copies in hardcover, and maybe ten thousand in paperback. That's respectable, but on the lower end. That's about the maximum of what literary fiction will sell. But these Kensington books are selling ten to fifteen thousand in hardcover--two to three times the numbers of these literary gay books--and the gay teen books are selling in the mid teen thousand hardcover too, and two to three times that in paperback.
MJ: Talking about the dark side of the whole thing, we can't talk about gay fiction without looking at the bigger picture of fiction in general and the fact is it's a shrinking pool. Steven King, Tom Clancy, John Grisham; their numbers are down dramatically from back in the early '80s.

AE: So people are buying less books, or less fiction?
BH: Well both, but it's true, when you look at the whole fiction market I think numbers are going up slightly, but that is because it's all confounded by Chicken Soup, you know, piece of crap for the soul.
MJ: Well, those books have their fans, and they're harmless enough.
BH: But are they really books? They're not really books. Michael got the figures for his latest book and they were pretty good, but they are really good, his agent said, relative to the fact that most books are really kind of sucking this fall, because there is a big drop.

AE: Is there just a slow march, because of the saturation of the media, towards people watching movies instead of reading books?
MJ: As the younger generation is getting older, they’re just continuing to play games and watching TV and DVDs and computer stuff more and more. The most amazing thing to me--the clearest division to me of what is going on--is what I see in my day job as a flight attendant. We rent those digi-players [portable DVD players] to passengers, and they predominantly rent to people thirty years and under. People thirty and over read books, people thirty and under have to have something to entertain themselves for the whole flight. It is just so interesting to me to see that division, and the younger they are the more likely they are to want the digi-player.
BH: How old are you Sarah?

AE: I'm 30, and I get that digi-player every damn time! I admit it, I'm squarely in that entertainment generation. Although I still love to read.
BH: But I want to put some of the blame on the industry, because I feel like part of the problem is the way books are sold, and the books themselves. There have been so many sucky books--so many crappy books--released that shouldn't have been published in the first place. Too many books have been published and it’s because of all these weird books. Too many celebrity books, I think, too much self-indulgent literary fiction, too much bad genre fiction. I think when you write a book that people want to read, they will buy it. I also think this whole notion of selling it in hardcover, you know--I don't want to spend twenty-five bucks on a book that I don't know I really want to read.

Page 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 - Next