Commercial fiction’s writers get readers. Can they ever get respect?

Call it popular fiction. Call it commercial fiction. Even, in some cases, call it women’s fiction. Whatever the label, it’s topping the bestsellers lists across the country. But for many writers in the Canadian literary scene, selling millions of copies isn’t enough to be welcomed with open arms into the writerly canon or even end up on prize lists. It’s something Marissa Stapley, who writes commercial fiction, including her latest, The Last Resort, has given a lot of thought to. “I get the sense, certainly not from all writers or advocates of more literary fiction or CanLit, but certainly some, that there’s a sense that the tent is not big enough and that commercial fiction is barging in and taking over,” she says. “And for every Canadian book that’s considered commercial fiction that does really well there seems to be, some who feel, well, that’s taking away from more literary work that could be doing well.”

The idea being that there’s not enough book-buying pie to go around. There might be something to that — not because there’s not enough room in the book-buying pie, but because the bestselling books are becoming colossal sellers. The culprit might just be a sign of the times and, more to the point, technology and social media, where word of mouth — or word of tweet or Goodreads review — can keep a big title front and centre so that new readers keep discovering and buying it. “I just think popular fiction is more popular than ever,” says Leo MacDonald, senior vice-president of sales and marketing at HarperCollins Canada. His publishing house has found a sweet spot in the book market, with their books commanding spots on the bestsellers lists week after week including a couple of decidedly Canadian titles: The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanne Goodman, about a teenager in 1950s Quebec who is forced to give her daughter up for adoption and The Quintland Sisters by Shelley Wood, a fictionalized account of the Dionne quintuplets’ story.

“Because of social media … people are all buying, I mean look at The Tattooist of Auschwitz,”which has spent the last year on the bestseller lists,” says MacDonald. “People keep discovering and buying that book and it’s word of mouth, it’s social media, books staying on the list much longer, the Perfect Girlfriend was No. 1 for 8 or 9 weeks.” But another twist is that the bestsellers lists are being compiled, for the most part, using data collected by BookNet Canada. In earlier years, those who compiled the bestsellers lists would contact bookstores themselves, meaning the lists were not always the same. These days, we can measure exactly what books Canadians are buying. The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris, isn’t Canadian; but it’s certainly one of the books Canadians are clearly reading — and buying. Stapley suggests that helping homegrown commercial writers like her, as they vie for attention with such juggernauts, would pay off for our publishers. “Canadian readers read a lot of commercial fiction and they often read it from other countries, so why not have it coming from here?” says Stapley. “It’s not taking away from anyone; in fact, it helps the publishing houses flourish so they can afford to publish more authors.” But if Canadian writers of commercial fiction aspire to win even Canadian awards, they face competition from stories and authors well beyond our borders. The Giller Prize’s rules regarding what it means to be Canadian have courted some controversy: Rachel Cusk, who was nominated in 2015 and 2017, David Szalay who was nominated in 2016, were both born in Canada but left when they were quite young. The same is true for Eleanor Catton, who won the 2013 Governor General’s Award for fiction. None of these books were set in Canada. The point being, even stories that are not identifiably Canadian can make it to our awards podium, if they’re considered literary; commercial writers, even those with deeper roots here, seem to be out of luck.

She’s now writing her 15th book. Her current publisher, Simon and Schuster, has just re-releasing one of her earlier novels, Season of Storms here (it’s always been in print in some part of the world — and it’s a favourite of Canadian actress Cynthia Dale, with whom Kearsley consulted about the details of being an actor); overall, she has sold more than a million books in North America alone and has been translated into 25 languages. Sounds impressive, but she falls into that category of popular fiction that isn’t recognized by prizes in this country.

“I wish we had something like that for commercial fiction, like a prize for that kind of sweet spot book, a book-club book,” says Carolyn Forde, a senior literary agent with the Transatlantic agency, about the Giller. “That would be great. But usually if they (commercial writers) succeed they are rewarded with great sales.” But are great sales enough of a prize? In the U.K., there is a prize of the sort Forde imagines — in fact, there are a couple of them: the Costa Prize for and the Bailey prize for women’s fiction which was established in 1996. That kind of prize-giving culture that goes beyond the literary genre gave Kearsley an early boost — securing her both sales and media attention at the beginning of her career (I first interviewed her when she won Britain’s Catherine Cookson prize for historical fiction for her first novel, Marianna— at the time she was working as a waitress to pay the bills).“Ten thousand pounds plus a publishing contract with Transworld publishing in the U.K., which was the British arm of Bantam Doubleday,” she recalls. It helped her to become a full-time author, something many writers — literary or otherwise — who are juggling jobs as teachers, booksellers or baristas, can only dream of. Kearsley also has a background as a museum curator. That eye caused her to notice an interesting thing about past winners of Governor General’s literary awards: they weren’t consigned to literary books only. As she puts it: “there was room for everyone.” Sure, there were GG winners we know and still study: Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends The Night, for example, which won the English Fiction category in 1959 or Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute which won (in translation, for it was first published in French) the English Fiction category in 1947. But move back a little bit. Take, for example, the early winners. Gwethalyn Graham — a two-time GG English Fiction winner, for Swiss Sonata in 1938 and Earth and High Heaven in 1944 (the first Canadian book to reach No. 1 on the New York Times bestsellers lists — and a popular romance). Both books were popular fiction and among the bestsellers of their times. Here’s what a critic writing for Kirkus Reviews said about it at the time: “Excellent situations — good dialog — well-paced plot — convincing characterizations for a theme of conflict between Jew and Gentile crossing social barriors (sic) in wartime Montreal.” Surely sounds like the sort of things we still look for in good fiction, commercial or otherwise. “To me popular fiction is well-written books,” says MacDonald. “I think people confuse it sometimes — when they think of popular fiction they think of James Patterson and to me that’s not ... those books tend to do well the first three weeks then fade.” While the literary crowd might look down their nose at commercial fiction, really what we’re talking about is books written for a broad readership, books such as Graham’s. And the snobbery can run both ways. “There are popular fiction authors who believe literary authors are all hoity toity when they’re not, and there are literary fiction authors that believe popular fiction authors just throw things on the page when we don’t,” says Kearsley. And while defining the difference between commercial and literary can be a bit like asking the question how long is a piece of string (answer: it depends) there are elements you can talk about, as the Kirkus reviewer did. “I read a book recently which I really enjoyed but I kept thinking, to myself, OK, here is an example of the difference between commercial and literary. The author’s prose was great, but I guess there wasn’t quite enough tension, and I kept thinking there’s not enough ambition here, the ambition is all in the prose, so there’s not thought about ‘let’s make this a page-turner.’ I think the best fiction does both,” says Stapley. Ah, that sweet spot. It’s referred to in conversations across the land in even the most rarefied publishing circles: the books loved by the literary crowd and are widely read, enjoyed — and bought. “That’s the elixir,” says MacDonald. “You’ve got to get that thing that blends the two ... into a nice (thing) book clubs like to read.” Sometimes an author will score a direct hit — Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, for example, which was nominated for the Booker Prize, won the Giller Prize and has spent a good part of the past year on the bestsellers lists. These are the breakout books the industry hopes for. “Publishers in Canada are looking for that spot that everyone always talks about, that sweet spot that still looks literary but will sell a lot of copies to people who don’t maybe buy every literary book,” agrees Forde, who represents authors including the bestselling Karma Brown. Publishers are also, she notes, going after more aggressively the space that used to be dominated by commercial fiction — even genre fiction such as romance. Which means some writers are getting huge marketing pushes behind them, and some are simply getting left behind. MacDonald does note that, “I think what’s been sacrificed is that midlist,” those authors who aren’t going to create blockbuster books, but who have made a career of their writing. “Some of us are more sensitive than others,” says Stapley about the divide in the Canadian writing scene. “I think that sometimes we think we’re on the fringes. But maybe writers who are considered more literary are looking at more commercial authors and saying ‘Oh, gee, it’d be really nice to be getting big advances and it’d be really nice to be getting on the bestseller lists and making royalty cheques. “Frankly, I’d really rather be making a living and being a writer full time.”

Source: Thestar.com

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