http://www.printing-in-china.cn/shownews.asp?id=1840
With publishing hit harder than most fields by the global financial crisis, and not being all that adventurous an industry to begin with, it was inevitable that 2010 would be a year of consolidation and playing it safe. Yes, cookbooks, children's books and business guides did well, and on the fiction front there were plenty of vampires, forensic pathology whodunnits, serial killers and conspiracy thrillers. More editorial work than ever is going into making mass fiction as compatible as possible with what most people expect a genre to entail, and more books are fitting into multi-volume series with protagonists and scenarios that people become familiar with.
Formulaic writing is nothing new. In 1936, mystery writer S.S. Van Dine published an article called "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories", among which included: "the reader should have the same opportunity as the detective to solve the crime", "no tricks can be played to mislead the reader unless it is also done to the detective by the criminal", "neither the detective nor one of the official investigators can turn out to be the criminal" and "the villain must be found by logical deduction, not luck, accident, or un-motivated confessions." Another 16 rules circumscribe other feats of imagination, to the point where it seems impossible to write anything original and still adhere to the rules. But even within this framework is room to manoeuvre, and Agatha Christie managed to write dozens of classics without smashing the mystery framework. And as many genre writers will point out, a sonnet is a formula, a pop song is a formula, most television series fit time and thematic constraints and yet at the top end of the quality spectrum there is plenty of imagination, spark and originality.
And 2010 saw lots of edifying and entertaining books published. The difficulty is in finding them, of weeding through the pulp, the how-to and the cookery and finding works with the power to expand the scope of a reader's imagination.
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