Tips and Timesavers

Genre Knockers(Popular Fiction)

The question was asked by someone new on a commercial writer's loop "what is 'literary fiction'?" and the best answer (by far) was "What the rest of us support."

Literary fiction is the top point of the fiction pyramid where fewer authors dwell amongst fewer publishers and even fewer sales (comparably). But it is somewhat hallowed ground. It's emminently respectable. The rest of the pyramid basically comprises 'popular' or 'commercial' fiction. Yep, it's what people buy. Sci-fi, fantasy, who-dunnits, love stories, historicals, Young Adult, erotic fiction. And each brings with it a varying degree of credibility.

Signing up with HMB, I realised that any media/PR activities would lead, inevitably, to dealing with those sticky anti-romance questions that are such fun to negotiate. So I jotted a few romance myths down to tackle in anticipation. As I looked around, I found lots of other authors who have almost identical lists of anti-romance sentiment.

And I actually felt encouraged.

This means the criticism is generally finite. Maybe people have run out of things to knock if we're starting to repeat ourselves. There are some very good analyses of romance bashing on the websites of authors Anne Gracie and Jenny Crusie should you care to go for something a little more cerebral than my 'cop that' approach.

The Myths

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