This morning I read a piece on The Bookseller and on the Guardian (ugh) about how author Polly Courtney has ‘ditched’ her publisher Avon / HarperCollins because she doesn’t like how her novels have been packaged.
She said (and I take this quote from the Guardian, in case anyone wants to get Johann Hari on my ass):
“My writing has been shoehorned into a place that’s not right for it. It is commercial fiction, it is not literary, but the real issue I have is that it has been completely defined as women’s fiction … Yes it is page turning, no it’s not War and Peace. But it shouldn’t be portrayed as chick lit.
“I’m not averse to the term chick lit, but I don’t think that’s what my book is. The implication with chick lit is that it’s about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams. [My books] are about social issues – this time about a woman in a lads’ mag environment and the impact of media on society, and feminism.”
And it is this quote – along with how she’s publicly treated her publisher – that irritates.
Ask anyone what a chick lit novel looks like and the answers will pretty much be the same; there will be an arresting colour cover, possibly a swirly font, and the main image will be of a striking young woman.
Ask a range of people what they think chick lit novels are about, and the answers will vary. You’ll get the uninformed ‘it’s about a girl who goes shopping and bags a rich man’ response (cheers, Kinsella!), or, if you’re speaking to someone who’s read more than one chick-lit novel, you’ll get a different response. Quite literally, the subject of chick lit novels can be pretty much anything that can be related to a woman’s life.
What chick lit isn’t is one sort of book, with the same subject matter rewritten over and over again. It’s a genre of books, and within it are even more sub-genres. Yes, you can get idiotic novels about girls who are obsessed with shopping (if that’s what floats your boat), but you can also find novels – just like mine – that have a focus on interesting and relevant current affairs. Take a look at the synopsis of THE MAKING OF MIA, which explored how women’s magazines can negatively impact on women’s perceptions of their looks and lives. Does that sound any different to what Courtney described as “the impact of media on society, and feminism”? I think not.
So if Courtney and I are writing similar books, and mine are chick lit and hers aren’t, what’s the difference?
Obviously how you categorise a book is a personal preference. I don’t have any issues saying my novels are chick lit – I’m proud that they’re chick lit, especially when you consider how popular the genre is – and I’d also say that some books that you wouldn’t necessarily consider to be chick lit could be categorised as such. I personally think the incredibly popular One Day, for example, could be seen as chick lit – and the only reason it wasn’t was because the publisher chose not to market it as women’s fiction. They marketed it as a novel that could be enjoyed by both genders, and the mainly orange cover – a colour beloved by EasyJet – signposts this for potential readers. If you replaced the orange with hot pink, would it have had the same multi-gender appeal? I doubt it … but I also know of many men who couldn’t finish the book because it was too ‘girly’ and they felt tricked into buying what they thought was something along the lines of a Nick Hornby.
And it is this marketing which brings us nicely back to Courtney, who disliked the marketing of her novel as chick lit. When you look at Courtney’s covers – or even her website – they’re pretty terrible (yet not pink and ‘fluffy’ – which is what she’s complained about). I’m not exactly a marketing expert, but if you put one of her books in front of me, I could guess that they were being marketed as chick lit, but I couldn’t be certain. They look cheap and nasty, and I can see why Courtney didn’t like them. The books look like they’ve been created by a publisher that wanted to market as chick lit – because that is what’s popular and will therefore get sales – but it looks like the design and style have been compromised to make Courtney happy with them. Ultimately they don’t really work – who would pick any of those books up? – and that’s because they don’t lend themselves strongly enough to one particular genre. They don’t look like chick lit, they don’t look literary, and they don’t look like anything in between. They just look bad.
Courtney has made a mistake to claim her novels aren’t chick lit, and if an author is going to publicly complain about a publisher then self-publishing is probably the proper space for them to operate in. It’s not professional behaviour, and it smacks of a precious author who thinks she knows better than a publisher with years of experience and success.
Ultimately Courtney may find her return to self-publishing a fruitful one (especially if she sells her books for 10p on Amazon like many other self-published authors), and I wish her well with it. It is difficult to find a unique marketing identity in the mass-market book industry and if Courtney doesn’t feel the tried-and-tested way of promoting and selling books is right for her content, then she has to find her own path.
However I think she’s wrong, and I also think she’s insulted those of us who write chick lit that’s intelligent, fun and culturally aware. A book can be meaty, it can be clever, and there may not be one word about shopping within it. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t chick lit … and it also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t capitalise on the phenomenally clear marketing power that chick lit novels can harness.
PS – yes I have read one of Courtney’s books. And I thought it was chick lit. x
5 comments
Laura says:
Sep 15, 2011
I completely agree. The only thing about her book covers that is slightly chick lit is the fact they all feature women…but if the main cover is a woman why not? The design is terrible with the models, fonts, colours and even the clothing being downright uninspiring. Not every woman on a book cover has to be gorgeous and 21 but when you read a book it is to, in my opinion, to experience a new world and I don’t want to experience the bland stories those covers portray.
Dee says:
Sep 15, 2011
I think in any situation, it’s always silly to bite the hand that feeds you, right? Obviously, if you’re not happy with the covers etcetera – which to be honest, looking at them on her website look quite bad – you address that with the publisher, surely? I personally think chick lit can cover a range of subjects. Not all chick lit needs to be full of clumsy girls who do hilariously Bridget Jones type things, I’ve read books I would consider to be chick lit that are about subjects such as cancer etcetera. Now, back to those covers – I’ve got to say, they really are quite bad. You absolutely do judge books by their covers when all you have to go for in a enormous book shop like Waterstones is the cover. You need something that is beautiful to stand out – I agree that most cover-art for chick lit is generally quite cute, fluffy, using illustrations of skinny women with shopping bags, or of high heels etcetera. However I don’t necessarily hold it against them – I read a lot of chick lit, and often the covers are the reason for buying them, along with previous experience with the author of them. I think that Polly should have addressed the issue of the covers, instead of publicly claiming that she isn’t chick lit and that the covers are sexist. I don’t think the covers are sexist – I think they look badly done, bad graphics and typography. I think she’s gone about this completely wrong.
And you’re right about One Day – I didn’t read it initially because I thought it sounded like it was chick lit, but the cover made me second guess – it left me feeling slightly confused about what I was going to find inside. They also look VERY similar to Nick Hornby’s covers.
It’s an odd thing, the discussion about Chick Lit covers, and the genre. I think it’s an entirely personal opinion.
Interesting discussion though! Thanks for bringing this to my attention
Tamsyn Murray says:
Sep 16, 2011
Agree, Ilana. And self-publishing is clearly the route for Polly Courtney, since few respected publishers would be interested in her work after a stunt like that. Unprofessional doesn’t begin to cover it.
There’s nothing wrong with the term chick-lit – to me, it flags up exactly what I’m getting, just as the term crime novel tells me there’s likely to be a body or two and a few police officers involved. It’s certainly not a derogatory term.
PS I also agree about One Day.
Julie Cohen says:
Sep 16, 2011
My first thought when I read the piece about Courtney was much like yours—that if Courtney believes that her books can’t be chick lit purely because they deal with “serious” issues, then she can’t have read very much chick lit.
My favourite chick lit books deal with the real, messy, emotional issues in women’s lives, in a helpful and uplifting way that nevertheless doesn’t compromise on honesty and edge. I’m proud to write in the genre.
I won’t comment on the professionalism of not knowing your own genre, or publicly “sacking” a publisher whose stated mission for this particular line is to publish this very kind of novels, and with whom you apparently don’t have a current contract anyway…she certainly has got lots of lovely publicity though, eh?
Claire says:
Sep 16, 2011
I agree that the range of what counts as ‘chick lit’ is a very wide and varied spectrum.
I also think that it’s a mighty coincidence that Courtney chooses the day of her book launch to complain, rather loudly and publiclly, about the covers etc, as if that was the first time in the many, many months the book was in production that she saw the covers.
Personally I feel that if you don’t want to be classified as a chick-lit author then don’t write chick-lit