How Capitalism and Writing Courses Have Destroyed Satisfying Escapist Fiction.
Literary fiction is boring, pretentious, and it never sells millions — for good reason.
I always loved the films of Steven Spielberg. After he completed a BA degree in Film and Electronic Arts in 2002 at the age of 56, I never went to see another movie of his. He had changed course. Instead of remaining in the entertainment and escapist business, he entered the literary merit business. And I have no time for literary merit. Unsurprisingly, the majority of people don’t.
When you look at the sales of Booker and Nobel Prize winners, the sales of those books can be anything from under 2000 copies sold to 300,000. None of them hit the millions that James Patterson, Lee Childs, Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, Christine Feehan, Sherilyn Kenyon, Danielle Steele, Robin Cook, Michael Crichton, and the many international bestselling authors do. More interestingly, until they won those literary prizes, most people hadn’t heard of them, and their books had sold very few copies.
