Even Jamie Oliver liked Fifty Shades of Grey!
I was toodling around the internet last week, as I do, and I ran across a post titled "Five Trends I Hope Will Die in 2013". I think it was about celebrities or something, but I can't find the original article. Sorry! Anyway, I thought it would be fun to do a similar list about books.
- Fifty Shades-alike covers--Okay, I get that this is a marketing thing, but the cover wasn't that great to being with and I don't think Fifty Shades was a success based on its cover. So can we please stop creating lookalike covers for every contemporary novel with sex in it?
- Drama llama--Remember at the beginning of 2012 when every week some author would fly off the handle and attack a reviewer, or write a post about how reviews "should" be written online (favorably, of course)? And then there was the GR Bully site (created by, ironically, bullies). Wouldn't it be weird if nothing like that happened in 2013? Just imagine how easy it would be to enjoy reading!
- Consolidating publishers--Not that I know anything about the publishing industry aside from observation, but in the long term I think the merging of the bigger publishing companies (e.g., Random Penguin) will wind up hurting the Big
654. To me it seems like the big publishers' problems lie in being slow to adapt to a changing market. Turning themselves into bigger companies is NOT going to help that; publishing is becoming more decentralized and personally I'd like to see more publishers and more variety in the market--that's not self-pub'd--not less. But of course breaking into smaller companies is not only more expensive in the short term, but more difficult to manage.
What are some bookish trends you hope not to see in 2013?
