Buzz, Balls & Hype : Ho Hum Fiction is Dead

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August 16, 2006

Ho Hum Fiction is Dead

Big News Flash: some non fiction books are out selling fiction titles.

The Star Tribune reports: "In this age of declining readership for all sorts of publications, any reading is good reading, right? Maybe. But does a de-emphasis of the literary novel -- still the form of entertainment that requires the most engagement and conjecture on the reader's part -- coincide with a devaluation of the imagination?"

"In 2005, "truth was stronger than fiction," said Daisy Maryles, executive editor of Publishers Weekly. "The top nine bestsellers in nonfiction each sold more than a million copies." She cited such "megabooks" as "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About" by Kevin Trudeau (2.7 million copies) and the religious-themed "The Purpose-Driven Life" (2.5 million copies, in its fourth year in print) as helping to spike those figures, and noted that such genre-fiction titans as James Patterson, John Grisham and Patricia Cornwell also continue to sell more than a million copies of each new hardcover.

Okay, I get it. A big non fiction book can outsell a fiction title. Well those titles versus those titles yes. But I can name ten other non fiction titles that undersold ten other fiction titles. What am I missing?

August 16, 2006 | Permalink

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