PG seldom posts two items from the same source during a single day, but he couldn’t pass on Big Publishing at its finest.
Plus, this is the first time PG recalls the head of Amazon Publishing being quoted in a story that’s all about New York Publishing and its idea of smart marketing, e.g. selling to people exactly like themselves or how they imagine themselves if they’re not the CEO.
From The Wall Street Journal:
The siren call of the “beach read” finally reached Jennifer Weiner, who long considered the term dismissive of writing associated with women.
“After years and years of, ‘This is sexist,’ I was like, ‘You know what? If I can’t beat them, join them,’ ” said Ms. Weiner, whose new book out this spring, “The Summer Place,” is set on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)
“I wanted to be at the beach,” said the author, who wrote the novel during the pandemic, the last in her three-book Cape Cod series. “I wanted to be anywhere but stuck in my house with my family.”
Beach reads, loosely defined as any engrossing tale released for summer, are under pressure to perform. June has been the second-biggest month for adult fiction sales for the past decade, according to NPD BookScan, and book sales overall soared during the pandemic. Now, as vacations start in earnest with the Fourth of July holiday, publishers are trying to hang on to those numbers.
Novels with beachy covers are so popular, book industry executives say, publishers put bare feet and glistening seas on all manner of titles.
“Authors perhaps have a darker element only to find that our covers are enormously beachy and sunshiny,” said beach-read novelist Jane Green. “Publishers think that a beachy cover will pull in readers even when it has little to do with the story.”
Ms. Green had a working title of “The Hemlock Sisters” for her 2017 novel about a dying mother who calls her estranged daughters back home to assist in her suicide. It ended up with the title “The Sunshine Sisters” and features an aquamarine sea on its cover.
Last summer’s hit “Malibu Rising” by Taylor Jenkins Reid has a cover of surfers shot from above on a seductive blue ocean, but its tale of sibling bonds after a mother’s drowning death is far from a Barbie beach party. This year, “Vacationland” by Meg Mitchell Moore uses a similar image—an overhead view of an ocean just begging the reader to jump in—while the book explores the impact of cancer and Alzheimer’s disease on its characters.
Ms. Reid and her publisher declined to comment and attempts to reach Ms. Moore and her publisher were unsuccessful.
“There’s a reason publishers lean this way,” said Sarah Gelman, editorial director of Amazon Books. “Beach books sell well when people who don’t have time to read say, ‘This is the one book I’m going to pack when I go to the Jersey Shore.’ ”
Successful beach-read authors know what readers are looking for. “They want to hear the scrape of a palmetto frond against a screen door,” said Mary Kay Andrews, author of the new book “The Homewreckers,” about a widow who stars in a beach house renovation reality show. “They want to see those curtains blowing in the summer breeze, and they want to hear the waves lapping at the shore.”
Ms. Andrews mostly writes in her Atlanta home with a scented candle she said “smells like waves” to get into a nautical mood.
Others ponder how to put “summer” in their book titles or find new ways to describe sand. Ms. Weiner pictures the “splayed fingers of a clutching hand” on a shrub-covered sand dune, Nancy Thayer describes an “elbow of sand” while Elin Hilderbrand writes about a “long arm of golden sand.”
“I’ll just be like, ‘I hope I haven’t said this before,’ ” said Ms. Hilderbrand, a novelist who is so associated with Nantucket, Mass., she wrote sightings of herself into her latest book, “The Hotel Nantucket,” which came out in June. (The “local author” is spotted by the ferry and at a bar.)
Sunny Hostin, the legal journalist-TV host who wrote the 2021 bestseller “Summer on the Bluffs,” entered the beach-read genre because she saw it lacking diversity. She set her novel in Oak Bluffs, Mass., a town on Martha’s Vineyard with a history as a summer escape for wealthy Black families.
“I think a lot of people underestimated this book,” Ms. Hostin said of the first novel in her beach-set trilogy. “I knew there was an audience.”
Beach-read writers make efforts to not tread on other authors’ turf. A swath of North Carolina’s Outer Banks often appears in Kristy Woodson Harvey’s books. Isle of Palms, S.C., is author Mary Alice Monroe’s territory. Spots on the Georgia coast belong to Ms. Andrews.
Ms. Green set her 2008 drama “The Beach House” and her 2015 novel “Summer Secrets” on Nantucket. She has since switched to Westport, Conn., where she has a home by the water.
“Today, I would never dare write about Nantucket,” Ms. Green said. “Nantucket is owned by Elin and should be owned by Elin.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal