In 2001, Beryl Bainbridge fired the opening salvo in what have become the chick lit wars. Using her platform as a Booker Prize favorite, she called the growing number of novels about 20-somethings contemplating their less-than-perfect loves and careers "a froth sort of thing." Not exactly a shot heard 'round the world, but Bainbridge's words struck a nerve. In the U.K.—home of such bestselling authors as Sophie Kinsella, Jane Green and Anna Maxted—The Independent took up the charge in an August 2002 article that crowed, "The chick lit phenomenon is in decline." Stateside, Book magazine got on the bandwagon this July, with an article that, in its own lingua franca, deemed chick lit so over.
Have reports of the genre's death been greatly exaggerated? Seven chick lit books spent a total of 90 weeks on PW's hardcover, paperback and mass market bestseller lists in 2002, and 10 titles have amassed 103 weeks on the lists this year, with a little more than two months to go. Yet in the publishing industry, there's a sense that chick lit may have reached a turning point. While Barnes & Noble—like Amazon and Borders—reported that sales are holding steady, some chick lit imprints are starting to hedge their bets.
Attracting Attention
It's certainly harder these days to make a chick lit title stand out—even with a blindingly neon pink cover. When Viking published Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1998) and Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999)—which have since sold two million copies and just under one million copies, respectively—they weren't competing with other, similar titles.
"There's definitely a glutted market out there," said Morrow senior director of publicity Debbie Stier. To bring Marian Keyes's Sushi for Beginners to the attention of magazine editors last May, Morrow delivered galleys with platters of sushi and "training" chopsticks. The house also created "look books," similar to those fashion designers distribute during Fashion Week, and held a party at New York's club-of-the-moment in lieu of a traditional author tour—all to elevate one title above the madding pink crowd. The results of that effort—coverage on CBS's Early Show and in the New York Times Style section—show that while it isn't easy to attract media attention, key titles can still get solid TV and print coverage.
But word of mouth among readers is at least as important, according to Amazon senior book editor Brad Parsons. "More and more titles, especially debuts, are arriving with a built-in buzz. Readers are pretty savvy—and pretty wary—about this. I'm not saying these books are 'review-proof,' but these are the kinds of titles that people are passing around, telling their friends about, reading about in magazines."
In bookstores, chick lit readers are reluctant to trawl through general fiction sections in search of new titles. Booksellers are grouping the books together in displays, though none that PW spoke to have established independent sections for them, as they have for romance and science fiction. At Books Inc. in the San Francisco area, manager Nick Petrulakis keeps a table of chick lit titles close to the door of his store, one of eight in the independent chain. At Borders, fiction buyer Leah Rex buys "enough copies so we can promote them on a table, tree or other marketing vehicle. With chick lit, it's face-out display or die."
Some Room to Grow
One sign chick lit may be here to stay is that new variations have evolved from its original definition, which Morrow/Avon executive editor Carrie Feron described as "young, female empowerment stories that may or may not have a romantic element." (For many, however, even the basic chick lit rubric remains elusive. Petrulakis of Books Inc. said, "It's like pornography: I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.") Today, stores are stocking everything from "mom lit," such as Jane Green's Babyville (Broadway, May) and Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It (Vintage, Aug.) to "lady lit" (aka "hen lit"), such as Revenge of the Middle-aged Woman (Viking, Feb.) by Elizabeth Buchan. Soon, there will even be Christian chick lit, from Harlequin's Steeple Hill imprint.
Sessalee Hensley of Barnes & Noble reported that 2004 promises to be a banner year for the category. Though she admitted that "there was a period earlier this year when I thought chick lit was going to start falling by the wayside," she found that the February, March and April titles for next year look "very fresh," leading her to conclude that "chick lit is going to grow even stronger." Hensley singled out Sophie Kinsella's upcoming hardcover, Can You Keep a Secret? (Dial, 2004) as a sure winner.
She also identified "bridezilla lit" (most publishers have granted it the more polite term "bridal lit") as one of the few subcategories with room to grow. The only offshoot that's flopping, Hensley said, is "lad lit," or books about men in their 20s searching for Ms. Right, like Jim Keeble's trade paperback original, Men and Other Mammals (Hyperion, May). "Unless you're Nick Hornby, it's a small sliver of an audience," she said.
Hedging on Commitment
Another possible indicator of permanence is the recent launch of four trade paperback imprints dedicated solely—or almost—to chick lit. Created in November 2001, Harlequin's Red Dress Ink trade paperback line fueled speculation that chick lit was pecking away at the romance audience, though senior editor Margaret Marbury insisted to PW that it's aimed at "a completely separate audience from romance." Instead, Marbury suggested that chick lit readers—who bought more than 100,000 copies of See Jane Date (2001)—are women's magazine readers drawn by the imprint's low prices, $12.95 as a general rule. "They look at magazine racks and see the book and say, 'Well, it's not that much more,' " she said.
By the end of 2003, Red Dress will have increased its output from one title a month to three. At the same time, however, the imprint is widening its selection so that those titles will represent "one traditional chick lit, one non-traditional chick lit and one oddball," as Marbury put it. In other words, a scant two years after its launch, Red Dress seems to be backing away from an exclusive commitment to chick lit.
The signs at Ballantine's XYZ group (an imprint in all but name and logo) also point to the transience of chick lit. XYZ publishes nine or 10 trade paperbacks annually, mostly in the summer months. All are aimed at readers in their teens and 20s, and about half are chick lit. "XYZ is not specifically chick lit, because the number one question is, will chick lit last?" said editor Allison Dickens. "I think it will always be around in some form, but it may not always be as white hot as it is right now." To reach younger readers, XYZ has been advertising in Teen People and Cosmo Girl.
Meanwhile, Pocket's Downtown Press imprint, which launched in February 2003 with five titles and has published one a month since then, will grow to two a month in 2004. According to Louise Burke, Pocket executive v-p and publisher, highlights from the first list were Lisa Tucker's The Song Reader, Cara Lockwood's I Do (But I Don't) and Elise Juska's Getting Over Jack Wagner, each having "as many as 60,000 copies in print." Though the imprint published its first hardcover, Bite by C.J. Tosh (a pseudonym for two longtime magazine players), in September, it remains dedicated to trade paperback because of price. "These books have to be at a price that allows people to buy more than one a month," Burke said.
The most recent imprint to arrive on the scene is Kensington's Strapless, which launched in April 2003 and has one book a month scheduled through the end of 2004. Kensington editorial director John Scognamiglio explained that the imprint was created in response to requests from salespeople for a chick lit brand, particularly in light of the success of Girlfriends by Patrick Sanchez (2001), which has shipped more than 53,000 paperbacks.
Don't look for a chick lit imprint from St. Martin's, despite the 875,000 hardcovers and 850,000 paperbacks of The Nanny Diaries (2002) now in print. "Creating an imprint is often a knee-jerk reaction to books that have done well, but invariably they fold. When you grab someone by the lapels and say, 'This is for you. You're this type,' it backfires," said Jennifer Enderlin, associate publisher of St. Martin's paperbacks. However, St. Martin's is still active in the category. In June 2004 the press will publish the hardcover Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin, a first novel about a woman who falls in love with her best friend's fiancé.
Trying to Keep the Flame Burning
The rise of dedicated imprints may indicate that there are two kinds of chick lit, as different from each other as a free-range pullet and a Perdue roaster raised on a factory farm. One wing of the category is represented by author-identified titles, usually published in hardcover, such as Candace Bushnell's Trading Up (Hyperion, July) and Gigi Levangie Grazer's Maneater (S&S, June). The other consists of brand-identified trade paperback originals. Books from Downtown Press, for example, share a similar look and a hot-pink-and-black shopping bag logo, while downplaying author photos and bios, which are tucked inside the back cover. "The imprints are selling the brand rather than the author," explained Rex of Borders.
As the category grows, authors like Sophie Kinsella, whose Shopaholic series from Delta has grown markedly from one title to the next, stand out as rare birds. While Kinsella will move into hardcover with her new stand-alone title, Can You Keep a Secret?, that's not a typical trend. More often, an author's "first book will make a splash and the second one won't do as well," said Rachel Ray, PR and events coordinator at one of the seven Joseph Beth stores in Ohio and Kentucky. "The Oprah effect does seem to come into play." Ray reported selling more than 200 copies of Anna Maxted's first novel, Getting Over It (Regan Books, 2000), but only 37 copies of Running in Heels (Regan Books, 2001) and only 10 copies of Behaving Like Adults (Regan Books, May). The same fate may befall Jennifer Weiner, whose Good in Bed (Pocket, 2001) made a big splash and sold 235 copies at the store, while—in an admittedly shorter period of time—Weiner's latest, In Her Shoes (Atria, 2002), has sold 49 copies.
Meanwhile, some of the biggest titles in the category may get bigger, as a handful of films come to fruition: The Nanny Diaries, optioned by Miramax for $500,000; The Devil Wears Prada, optioned for $600,000 by Fox 2000; and Maneater, optioned for $1 million and set up at Universal.
Mixed Signals
Ultimately, chick lit is sending as many mixed signals as a toxic bachelor in love. That's to be expected from such a broad category operating on a two-tier system, not to mention a category that is changing directions as it develops. Both Bridget Jones's Diary and The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing satirized the lives of young, urban single women, while today's novels tend to approach their characters more earnestly.
Carole DeSanti, the v-p and editor-at-large for Viking who edited Helen Fielding and Melissa Banks in the U.S., fears her two bestselling titles have laid an egg. "Initially, women writers were trying to find a way to write about their lived experience that was vibrant and authentic and creative and artful. Now there's a range of definitions for chick lit, but the one we seem to be settling in with is the one that trivializes and dismisses it," she said.
When Meghan Daum set off to publicize the 50,000 copy first printing of her new hardcover novel, The Quality of Life Report (May), DeSanti was disappointed by how quickly she got pigeonholed by the media. Her book was dubbed chick lit because Daum was young and female and the plot touched on romance, even though Daum had already established herself as a literary writer with work in the New Yorker and an essay collection, My Misspent Youth (Open City, 2001). "In the marketing and packaging of The Quality of Life Report, we were countering the stereotype or the degrading label at every point, while trying not to lose the market," said DeSanti.
Other editors, booksellers and even authors are put off, too. "The phrase 'chick lit' gives me hives," said Enderlin of St. Martin's. "Let's destroy that term," suggested Virginia Valentine of the Tattered Cover in Denver. Kelly James-Enger, who penned two chick lit novels for Kensington's Strapless line, Did You Get the Vibe? (Nov.) and White Bikini Panties (Nov. 2004), isn't sure she likes the phrase either. "It is dismissive. I find myself saying, 'I sold my first novel, but it's only chick lit,' " she said.
Perhaps the truest sign of health for the category will be the disappearance of the term "chick lit" altogether. As DeSanti pointed out, "We don't call adventure books for men 'dick lit,' and the books we publish for Father's Day are just called 'the books we can publish into Father's Day.' "
