Look at the titles exposed in book shops…Publishers are selecting for success, not intellectual pretense and diversity - like they used to (and could afford to). Now that women dominate the fiction section we get clone after clone where a woman finds a box in the attic as she is cleaning up the house of her just expired mother or grandma and discovers a secret carried over 3 generations.
Or she inherits a house and finds a box and... you know…
A Dutch white male author sent his raw print to publisher after publisher and got friendly replies ‘very interesting but it’s not for us unfortunately’. Then he changed one thing: he replaced his name with a Moroccan one, turning himself into a young Moroccan woman of immigrant descent in the bio. The very next publisher offered him a contract. He then recruited a female Moroccan friend to draw out the trick a little further before making it public.
I think if there’s a future rebound in book sales, it can only mean one thing: that collecting books has become a status symbol
It even has a name now, especially on Instagram and in public spaces: “performative reading”.
Look at the titles exposed in book shops…Publishers are selecting for success, not intellectual pretense and diversity - like they used to (and could afford to). Now that women dominate the fiction section we get clone after clone where a woman finds a box in the attic as she is cleaning up the house of her just expired mother or grandma and discovers a secret carried over 3 generations.
Or she inherits a house and finds a box and... you know…
A Dutch white male author sent his raw print to publisher after publisher and got friendly replies ‘very interesting but it’s not for us unfortunately’. Then he changed one thing: he replaced his name with a Moroccan one, turning himself into a young Moroccan woman of immigrant descent in the bio. The very next publisher offered him a contract. He then recruited a female Moroccan friend to draw out the trick a little further before making it public.