Monday, March 05, 2007
Misery Sells
The bookshelves may be labelled 'Real Life,' 'Painful Lives,' or something similar, but the fact that there are bookstore sections devoted to these kinds of books attests to the selling power of misery literature, or 'mis lit.' Anthony Barnes, in the Independent, writes:
"As page-turners go, they are hardly the most uplifting of reads. The abuse, pain and betrayal are often relentless. But 'misery literature' has now become the book world's boom sector."New figures show that the misery memoir market doubled from £12m in 2005 to £24m last year, with up to 10 new titles vying to be top of the glums each month. The top-selling misery memoir in the UK -- Behind Closed Doors by Jenny Tomlin -- shifted 278,000 copies in 2006, more than six times the number sold by last year's Booker Prize winner, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.
"Of the 100 bestselling paperbacks last year, more than a tenth were tales of real-life misery, and they make up six of the top 10 in the Sunday Times paperback bestseller list. ...
"At their core, most are chilling tales of childhood abuse with some form of redemption and triumph against adversity at the end." These books apparently appeal most to women with young children.
Labels: bestsellers, bookselling, misery lit, UK
