Literary fortunes

[davywavy]

One of the ways the e-reader has changed the world is that it has spawned a massive rise in self-publishing. Authors who until only recently no sane publisher would have taken a risk on can now churn out that novel which they always felt they had in them (where it probably should have stayed) and bang it up on Amazon for a £1 download. Obviously there's a staggering volume of startling crap as a result, but as well remarkable sums of money have changed hands. Fifty Shades of Gray was self-published before being picked up by a publisher and discretely packaged for the high-class frotteur, and Amanda Hocking made millions from self-publishing teen vampire romances.

Now when I hear the words "made millions" it usually catches my attention, and naturally I started wondering what I might write.

The thing about the self-publishing boom is that much of it has taken place in genres that traditional publishers have considered uncommercial; take "Cosy Crime", for example. Cosy Crime as a genre is classic, gold-age era murder mysteries which dont' particularly challenge people who like watching Poirot on the telly and like a bit more of the same which panders to modern social mores.
You can understand why the 20s is a great era for crime. It's recognisably a modern setting, in that people have telephones and motor-cars, but its also reassuringly easy for those things to go wrong at a critical moment and society is more structured where (for the purposes of the narrative, anyway) everyone comfortingly knows their place and nother ever really changes. It would be almost impossible to write a 20s style country house murder mystery in the present day due to technology, unless you made it a spoof:

As lightning flashed and the rain poured down over Grimborough Manor, Colonel Harvey clutched his throat, gave a terrible gurgle, and slumped forward into the Gazpacho.
"Dead!" cried Doctor Wallis. "Poisoned!"
At the head of the table Lady Maude gave a short scream, which was quickly silenced by her husband. "There's a killer in this house" said Lord Stevenage. "One of us must go for the police immediately".
"But zhe bridge over zhe rivere", replied Alphonse Parquet, the great Dutch detective. "She 'as been washed away by zhe flurds".
"Not to worry, Alphonse!", said perky young heiress Emilia Spoonforth. "My fiancee with a mysterious past, Eric, has a four by four! That should be able to get through!"
"I'm not taking that thing out in this weather, or offroad for that matter", grumbled the mysterious, brooding Eric. "It'd invalidate the warranty. Why don't you just ring for the police?"
"The lines are down", said Lady Maude. "It was the lighting."
"Bloody hell", sputtered Amelia. "Don't you crumblies even have an iPhone? She pulled one out and dialled. "Hallo, police?"
"Police here. Please state the nature of the emergency."
"I'm at Grimborough Manor. There's been a murder!"
"A murder? Right, hold the line and I'll get you a crime number."
"A crime number? A man is dead!"
"You're right, that does sound serious. Shall you need counselling?"
Alphonse gently took the phone from her hand. "It eez cleeur, mes amis", he announced, "we will 'ave to solve zhe murdeur ourselves."


And that's why 1920s style murder mysteries don't translate to the present.

Anyway, the genre which has benefited the most from self-publishing has to be romance/smut and perhaps specifically Paranormal Romance. It's astonishing, but also unsurprising. Smut always colonises new technologies first (the porn industry adopting VHS back in the 1980s was one of the nails in the coffin for Betamax), and on the paranormal side I expect many teenagers have entertained fantasies about going out with someone dark and mysterious who turns out to have supernatural powers just because that would totally give them a feeling of superiority over everyone else at school. As a result, stories where this sort of thing happens sell like hot cakes on the internet and remarkable sums have been made - at 50p-£1 a download, thousands of sales can add up to a free holiday in very little time.

Like evolution exploding in a nutrient-rich environment, competition has created a remarkable blossoming of competing subgenres. If you have the stomach for it, you can find entire worlds you didn't know exists. Did you know that Billionaires* and Babies is a genre? With multiple writers? And fans? I didn't until I looked. And there's way worse than that out there. In fact, the real challenge to the aspiring supernatural romance writer is finding a type of supernatural creature which hasn't been done. Vampires? Old hat. Angels? Demons? Fairies? Elves? All done. I mean, Selkies - Selkies - possibly the least romantic or sexy fantastical creature there is, have got their own romance section. In fact, for some reason, there seems to be only one type of magical being which doesn't have much in the way of teen romance written about them.

So that gives me an idea:

Leprechaun Lust

In a twinkling, before her stood a short man in a dazzling green suit. He gave a mocking bow, and swept his bottle-green top hat off in genuflection. "A Leprechaun!", she gasped.
"None other!", he replied. "My name is Marc, and I have come to invite you to go on a quest to the end of the rainbow!"
Nothing had prepared her for the truth of all the legends her old grandfather had told her about the Emerald Isle. "But where does the Rainbow end?", she asked.
"Down my trousers", he replied seductively. "There's a crock of gold!"
"There's a crock of something, all right", she muttered darkly.


And really, that's the reason I'll never really write one of these things. The defining characteristic of the paranormal romance writer is that they actually can take it seriously. Damn.


*Billionaires aren't supernatural, but frankly they may as well be for all the likelihood you'll ever meet one.

Comments

[matrixmann]

Might be true that self-publishing did something to the all-the-money-no-risk industry.
But what about quality?

[(Anonymous)]

I read that and the only thing that came into my mind was Bullywug porn.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but that's the only thing which ever comes into your mind.

[(Anonymous)]

Confessions of a bullywug washing machine repair man.

[whiskeylover.livejournal.com]

Not too keen on the Leprechaun Lust (or Lep-Recon as Eoin Colfer had it in Artemis Fowl... not so much of the lust, though), but the Murder at Grimborough Manor, has potential. I like Emilia Spoonforth already as a character, and if my iPhone is anything to go by, then the signal can frequently be poor or non-existent (which also holds for wifi, skype, etc. Particularly now that increasing numbers of people no longer have the reliable old phonelines, which were rarely down, but tend to rely more and more on mobile phones and the like, technological problems abound yet again. To say nothing of the message that ended up in the SPAM folder, rather than having been opened and ironed before being placed on his Lordship's desk before reading...).