New Market?

Hyperion is opening up a new market, and maybe there is some hope for a certain type of author. According to the article in the NYT, the imprint is going after women.

Pause for stifling of yawns.

Hyperion is not alone in this venture, either. Other publishing houses, struggling to reach the book-buying public, are going to specifically target women. Not just any X-chromosome carrying female, either, but the sort of lady who does not read chick-lit no more.

If you're up on the market, you'd have heard that chick-lit is dead. It was a fad, like so many other things, and the publishers jumped on it with very heavy boots, as if this was the major breakthrough they needed. Needless to say, so much dreck was thrown at the bookstore wall that it stopped sticking, and literary agents decreed the genre deceased. In truth, the publishing houses did it to themselves, with marketing studies and focus groups and forgetting that people want good books for entertainment and enlightenment. A little variety goes a long way. Hard to put that into an Excel spreadsheet, though.

What is so different about Hyperion's venture? They're aiming at older women, those who are past thirty and well beyond the man-hunting, shopping, sleeping around world of the standard chick-lit tome. Ellen Archer, the brains behind the operation, realized that her life, and that of countless other women, was not reflected in that which her publishing house was printing. Like a one-woman focus group, she figured out that her target market was not buying stuff that they could not relate to, hence the decline in sales. So she looked around and said, Where's the stories about women who are dealing with an empty nest, dealing with menopause and approaching old age?

David Rosenthal at Simon and Schuster isn't buying it, however. He's not one to set up specific imprints for a particular class of reader. Considering the fact that Harlequin is watching their sales curve fall, he may have a point. Super-agent Binky Urban believes in Hyperion's Voice imprint, even if other folks in the publishing industry think that women's interests are far too broad to make an imprint viable.

Hyperion has put together a focus group. We may presume that they have a panel of women in their thirties and forties, a group that does not give a rat's arse about Manolo Blahnik shoes and Prada purses. These ladies will be quizzed and interviewed, asked what they like to read, and that will guide the editors of Voice.

So for all the would-be authors out there who have written novels that are not chick-lit, and grown frustrated with rejection because the novel was not chick-lit, it's time to dust off the manuscripts and submit again. Strike while the iron is hot, as they say, and feel free to quote from the article in the New York Times to demonstrate your vast knowledge of the market.

Don't go bothering Binky Urban, by the by. At least not until you've got some sizeable sales figures to lift you above the crowd.