What We Want

Today we bring you the next in our series of editors' blogs. Rob works on HarperFiction's hugely successful mass market list, and has worked with such greats as Michael Crichton, Val McDermid, Reginald Hill, Mark Mills and Andrew Gross.

As the world appears to be readying itself for a protracted period of gloom, the question remains about whether or not this will be an ‘interesting’ time for fiction publishing or not. We haven’t felt anything like the serious downturn yet, but already times are changing. The days of champagne at lunchtime to celebrate a new signing or a Top Ten place are probably over – at least for now. Cava’s making a comeback. So how will this change your reading habits (and thus our acquisition strategy)? First off, we can safely predict a reluctance to indulge in grim reading. This means not just the unlikelihood of a bestseller concerning Baby P – a sad thought at the best of times – but also novels about struggle, social realism and ‘issues’. In short, anything that threatens to be a downer.

That’s not to say that the future will be mere froth. ‘Celebrity’ literature is losing sales and perhaps people are looking for something with more depth, some real meaning now that the spendthrift culture of before looks increasingly foolish. Novels of inspiration, of triumph, novels that celebrate and examine life. Readers fed up with the hubris and self-regard of financiers will embrace a good moral heart. Not schmaltz necessarily but the likes of, say, Alexander McCall Smith; the positivity of his heroine Mma Ramotswe I suspect has won him many of his fans.

Working with a list that includes a lot of crime and thrillers, we’ve seen a number of books submitted recently with quite different heroes: midwives, coroners, social workers, solicitors even – less obvious figures, often public sector, involved in the periphery of the crime world. These characters are perhaps a reaction in the last couple of years by writers to the saturated cast of PIs, psychiatrists and grizzled coppers that stalk the bookshelves. The likes of Kay Scarpetta and Dr Temperance Brennan were newcomers to the crime block in their time and now everyone’s writing about forensics. Maybe another type of investigator will become popular in the next few years. So far, none of those we've read has managed to quite walk the fine path between realism and a good story. Often, the authors are trying to translate their day job into literary gold, but the results are either bleak homilies or rather pedantic procededurals.

Escapism will always, always be popular. Thrillers about regular people coping in extraordinary circumstances will do down well (just try to keep them vaguely credible). Where writers want to get down and dirty, I’d like to see good quality horror make a proper comeback. A popular resurgence has been talked about for months but I think it’s one of the few areas where you can keep the reader in a bad place without putting them off the book. It’s not going to happen in real life – is it?

Finally, and this is as much a personal wish as anything else, It would be good to see some comic fiction writers do well. Laughter is such a tonic – it can turn a whole bad day around. There are some highly accomplished writers of light fiction out there, but there’s nothing like the biting prose of some serious black comedy. Where’s the new Amis or Welsh? Or Jonathon Coe? Or even Tom Sharpe? I’d like to see some literate wit back on the shelves. I’ve had more chuckles at a wake than with some comic books (often with unlikely-sounding, convoluted titles) and described without qualification as ‘hilarious’. And now we come to the end…