Back in the day (late 80s to early 90s) when I was working for Bookstop and later Barnes and Noble "literary" and "mainstream" were not remotely the same thing. Umberto Eco and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were considered literary. Romance author Sandra Brown had decided she did not write romance anymore and vehemently demanded to be shelved in "general fiction" because she wrote novels that were "mainstream." Obviously those authors and those books were not remotely the same thing.
(I did have one store manager at Barnes and Noble order me to put both Brown and Marquez on the same endcap for Valentines Day as they both had "flowery covers.")
Supposedly things are different now and mainstream and literary are the same thing these days. That factors into "Genre lines: Why literary writers won’t self-publish." Interesting piece here by Chris Meadows.
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2 comments:
Some of the distinction is attitude, and some, between literary and mainstream, is the intended audience, although I suspect there is at least some crossover.
Agreed.
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