Susan Isaacs is no novice. Each of her nine novels, beginning with Compromising Positions in 1978, have been New York Times bestsellers and her work has been translated into 30 languages. So it may shock readers to learn that when Scribner prepared to publish 250,000 copies of Isaacs's 10th, Any Place I Hang My Hat, on October 5, it positioned the story of a 29-year-old political reporter searching for her biological mother as chick lit.

"Look, they want to sell books," said Isaacs. "Commercially, Scribner made a good decision."

While authors and publishers bristled at the "chick lit" label a couple of years ago, they're now flocking to it with the enthusiasm of sorority pledges—a sign that it's no longer the flavor of the month, but a bona fide publishing category. It's even inspired a full-length parody: the novel The Little White Car (Canongate, Sept.) by Danuta (aka Dan) de Rhodes.

"We've been in this chick lit ghetto and now people want in, because the books are selling," said Farrin Jacobs, editor at Red Dress Ink, Harlequin's three-year-old chick lit imprint.

One major sign of the genre's stability is the successful publication of first-time authors in both hardcover and paperback. Since St. Martin's published Emily Giffin's debut novel, Something Borrowed, in June, the hardcover has received reviews in Glamour and Entertainment Weekly, was excerpted in Complete Women's Magazine, and has returned to press for a total of more than 40,000 copies. On the paperback side, Red Dress Ink has shipped more than 55,000 copies of Lee Nichols's original novel, Tales of a Drama Queen (July), and more than 60,000 trade paperbacks of Laurie Graff's You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs (Jan.), which will be reissued in mass market in January.

Though there are plenty of one-hit wonders, a few chick lit authors are starting to produce successful second and third novels, and to expand into movies and television. Jennifer Weiner, whose third novel, Little Earthquakes (Atria, Sept.; S&S Audio) debuted at #7 on the New York Times bestseller list, is currently queen of the roost (see PW's Sept. 13 profile). Not only is HBO making a series based on Good in Bed (Pocket, 2001; S&S Audio), but the movie of In Her Shoes (Atria, 2002; S&S Audio) will be released in spring 2005, starring Cameron Diaz and Shirley McLaine. As an American author writing novels set in the U.S., Weiner represents a shift from the British brand names who've dominated the category, like Sophie Kinsella, Jane Green and, of course, Helen Fielding.

Another sign of the category's health is the way publishers are associating arguably unrelated books with chick lit. A few examples: Penguin/Tarcher editor Ken Siman touted Periel Aschenbrand's April 2005 paperback memoir, The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own, about teaching philosophy at a summer camp, as proof that "Chick lit need not be slick or syrupy—it can be raw and raunchy." Benson Gardner, publicity manager of the University of Wisconsin Press, plugged Jennifer Beth Cohen's September memoir, Lying Together: My Russian Affair, as "chick lit with brains." And Vintage/Anchor v-p and publicity director Russell Perreault characterized Abha Dawesar's Babyji (Feb. 2005), about a 16-year-old's sexual awakening in Delhi, as "lesbian chick lit," then admitted, "It's not a chick lit novel necessarily, but that audience will be interested. It's all much more fluid than it used to be."

Chick Lit Goes on a Diet

The new respect for chick lit may represent the good side of the aging process. The flip side is that, especially for imprints devoted to chick lit, the honeymoon is definitely over. "We've reached critical mass. The strong will survive," declared Louise Burke, executive v-p and publisher of Pocket Books, who oversees the one-and-a-half-year-old Downtown Press imprint, which is sticking to its current output of two titles per month on average. "When something's as hot as chick lit was last year, its possibilities are endless," she added. "Now we've come back to reality, and it's limited, and there are many, many more people publishing into it."

The other two dedicated imprints are also holding steady. Red Dress Ink still averages three titles per month, while Kensington's Strapless imprint, which passed the one-year mark in April, has continued on its track of one chick lit title per month. "We have no plans to expand, because there's a lot of competition," said editorial director John Scognamiglio.

Despite the tough odds, Dorchester launched a trade paperback chick lit imprint, Making It, in August with Alesia Holliday's American Idle, followed this month by Stephanie Rowe's Unbecoming Behavior. But, in what may be a sign of just how crowded the category is, editor Kate Seaver said the imprint is resisting a fixed publishing schedule in order to "choose the absolute best."

Ballantine, however, no longer groups trade paperback originals under its youth-oriented Fiction XYZ label. Editor Allison Dickens reported that the house has acquired fewer chick lit novels, although print runs for individual titles have remained steady.

Houses like Avon and St. Martin's that have published chick lit titles while avoiding branded imprints said they are pleased with their position. At Avon Trade paperbacks, v-p, executive editor Carrie Feron isn't sticking to a formula. "We're finding these stories in various permutations," she said, noting that she prefers the term "metro chic" to "chick lit." Avon Trade is also attempting to make its books stand out with the added value of "Little Black Book" sections that offer a glimpse into the inspiration behind the book, starting with Meg Cabot's Every Boy's Got One (Jan.).

Warner is the latest to jump in the mix: in 2005, the house will launch a trade paperback imprint—name as yet undecided—that will not focus entirely on chick lit, but will publish a fair amount of it. Among the 10 titles on the initial list will be Liza Palmer's Conversations with the Fat Girl and Everyone Else's Girl by Megan Crane, who wrote English as a Second Language (Aug.), a paperback original that now has 38,000 copies in print. But v-p, executive editor and trade paperback editorial director Amy Einhorn said that the imprint doesn't have a chick lit quota. "I don't want to buy books for the sake of filling slots," said Einhorn.

As the field grows, publishers and retailers are becoming more wary of chick lit's offshoots. "We've made some forays into darker chick lit, and readers aren't responding as well. What they want is the traditional stuff," said Red Dress Ink's Jacobs. The same goes for what Barnes & Noble fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley referred to last fall as "bridezilla" books. Those "did not pan out in any way," she said. "Chick lit has shifted back to the straight-on story of bad job, bad boyfriend, finding your way in life." However, last spring's two hardcover novels about young widows were exceptions.

I Vant to Suck Your Blahniks

There is, however, the curious case of paranormal chick lit, a burgeoning field. Berkley has had so much success with two mass market vampire books—Mary Janice Davidson's Undead and Unwed (Mar.) and Undead and Unemployed (Aug.)—that it will publish the author's third Undead title in hardcover. According to Nielsen Bookscan, Unwed has sold about 30,000 copies while Unemployed has sold just over 20,000.

Meanwhile, B&N's Hensley mentioned David Sosnowski's Vamped (Free Press, Aug.), which received a five-figure first printing, as a book to watch. Senior editor Amy Scheibe bought the hardcover in partnership with Downtown Press, which will handle the paperback; a film has also been optioned. And Ballantine's Dickens recently acquired Enchanted, Inc. by Shanna Swendson, a magic-tinged novel the press intends to publish as a trade paperback next summer. "The author calls it 'Hex and the City,' " said Dickens.

But while these titles mix chick lit and paranormal elements, it's not clear that they mark the emergence of an entirely new subgenre. Berkley senior editor Cindy Hwang said of the Undead books, "I really envisioned these as paranormal romances." Scheibe of Free Press saw Vamped simply as a one-off. And all three editors suggested the books build on the popularity of the cult television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which went off the air in 2003.

Long a staple for romance publishers, anthologies may be another growing area. In September, Red Dress Ink published the paperback original Girls' Night In—with contributions from Jennifer Weiner and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, and proceeds earmarked for the international charity War Child—and quickly sold out the 160,000-copy first printing. "The chick lit short story is a far cry from the MFA short story, but based on the sales and attention for that collection, people want it," said Jacobs.

Two more collections are on the way in October. Downtown Press has printed 75,000 copies of the $13 trade paperback American Girls About Town, which features 17 stories from authors such as Adriana Trigiani and Lauren Weisberger, and will benefit the U.K. children's charity Barnardo's and the American Make-A-Wish Foundation. Dorchester's Making It chick lit imprint will publish a $6.99 mass market anthology, Shop 'Til Yule Droop.

The Cross-Over Catch

If chick lit vampires and anthologies are quickly sucked dry, there are other subcategories developing. However, it's not clear how much their readers intersect with those devoted to more mainstream chick lit.

Take the Christian angle: several religion publishers have borrowed the genre's tropes, and successfully adjusted them for a more pious audience, as Christian romance has grown at a rate of 25% annually since 2001, according to the Evangelistic Christian Publishers Association. Integrity Publishing struck a chord with Neta Jackson's first book, The Yada Yada Prayer Group (2003; Oasis Audio), which has more than 100,000 copies in print. The sequel, The Yada Yada Prayer Group Gets Down (Aug.; Oasis Audio), has 57,500 copies in print after six weeks. At Thomas Nelson's nearly year-old WestBow fiction imprint, the prolific Kristin Billerbeck has gotten lots of press for her first two trade paperbacks, What a Girl Wants (Mar.) and She's Out of Control (July), about a "cute, eligible Christian girl" in Silicon Valley. A third novel featuring the same character is on the way: With This Ring, I'm Confused (Apr. 2005).

Harlequin, which launched the inspirational romance line, Steeple Hill Women's Fiction a year ago, is now introducing Steeple Hill Café, which will publish what the press terms "hip lit." It will launch in October with a 30,000-copy first printing of The Whitney Chronicles by Judy Baer, followed in December by Sadie-in-Waiting by Annie Jones. The imprint will publish six more titles in 2005 and 10 in 2006, promoting the series through Thrive, a 35,000-member Christian women's alliance, while keeping an eye on readers of Baer's young adult Cedar River Daydreams series from Bethany House Publishers, which has 1.25 million copies in print.

Steeple Hill executive editor Joan Marlow Golan believes that Baer's new title may cross over to the general trade market. But it's hard to imagine a mainstream readership embracing a protagonist who's preoccupied with trying "to bear authentic witness to her faith in Jesus Christ without seeming holier-than-thou or uncool to non-Christian friends" (in Golan's words) while searching for Mr. Right.

African-American chick lit, too, seems to be on the outside looking in. This summer saw publication of two widely publicized titles, Erica Kennedy's Bling (Miramax, June), a hip-hop fairy tale—cum—cautionary tale, and The Gotham Diaries, a social satire of upper-crust African-Americans by Tonya Lewis Lee and Crystal McCrary Anthony. But considering Kennedy's rumored $750,000 advance, her sales figures are likely to disappoint: Bling has close to 50,000 copies in print after two printings. The Gotham Diaries has fared somewhat better, with 62,000 copies in print, according to Hyperion v-p and publisher Ellen Archer, and a rumored advance of only $250,000 for two books. But Amazon senior editors Brad Thomas Parsons and Daphne Durham still see "room for growth in sales on these titles."

Though Archer emphasized that The Gotham Diaries has a 2% return rate, and believes that book will continue to sell, she admitted to some disappointment that the book didn't get a bigger bounce from the authors'Good Morning America appearance. "Unfortunately, there is still a tendency in the media to segregate black authors. What we've heard from salespeople and booksellers is that you really have to hit hard in the African-American market first, and then there is the crossover effect. It's harder breaking through the other way," Archer said.

Then again, other related categories, like the unfortunately named "hen lit," don't seem to need chick lit readers at all. Books like Nancy Thayer's The Hot Flash Club and Lorna Landvik's Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons (both Ballantine, 2003), which appeal to women in their 50s, push "very similar buttons to the ones Bridget Jones's Diary did for its early fans," observed Linda Marrow, v-p and editorial director of Ballantine.

The subgenre's other stars include Elizabeth Buchan and Haywood Smith. Buchan's Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (Viking, 2003; HighBridge Audio) went through seven printings and now has a total of 368,286 copies in print. And in January, the Penguin paperback reprint of her The Good Wife Strikes Back will enjoy a 250,000-copy first printing. Smith's The Red Hat Club (St. Martin's; Audio Renaissance) sold more than 100,000 copies when it was published in 2003, and will be followed in March by The Red Hat Club Rides Again.

Such books have the bonus of being accessible to their target audience even when published in hardcover, although their paperback sales are impressive as well. In its first month on sale, the paperback of Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons (Mar.) sold 200,000 copies.

Cheap and Chic

As always, price remains an issue for the core chick lit audience. "The lower the price, the more appealing the book," observed Scognamiglio at Kensington, whose Strapless titles stick to a $12.95 price that's fairly typical of the category. "I'm trying to be not more expensive than anyone else and not less expensive than anyone else," added Downtown Press's Burke. "Whatever the market will bear."

At Amazon, senior editors Durham and Parsons are seeing more paperback originals in this category than ever, while the hardcovers are often priced like high-end paperbacks. Red Dress Ink's first hardcover, Girl Boy Etc. (May), checked in at $19.95, and Lolly Winston's Good Grief (Warner, Apr.; Time Warner AudioBooks) was priced at an unusually low $18.

"With Good Grief, we made a very conscious decision to keep the price low, because we kept hearing from accounts that price was an issue, and she was a debut novelist," said Warner's Einhorn. "The line between hardcover and paperback is a line drawn in the sand, so it depends which way the wind blows."