/lit/ - Literature

>>13186737
I was clarifying >>13179486's post rather than saying it was the cause of the current book market. Writers are going to write whatever and how they develop is up to them, but publishers need to move books, so they follow trends and take options that minimize their personal risk. That's the nature of business, it's nothing new.

Trends are dictated by current culture and culture feeds culture, so you're going to see a lot of one thing for a long time before things shift. This can be observed in the current trend for superhero media which was preceded by zombie media; there was a similar boom for Western movies in the early-mid 20th century. People like familiarity, so yes, they will eat the same shit over and over until they're sick of it and want a new flavour. This is not just stupid people, this is everyone, though some are more willing to work out of their comfort zones than others.

So how does that tie into what shows up in your bookshops? As of right now, you have to deal with the fact that the majority of the American bookbuying market are women. I saw a thread earlier where another anon mentioned that and apparently that's considered shitposting, but it is, in fact, true, and not just for literature (see: the explosion of men's personal hygiene products from the early 00s onward, but I'll not delve into that here). There has been a long war against men and boys reading in American culture and if they're not reading books, they're not buying books and if they're not buying books, then publishers couldn't give less of a fuck about publishing books that might appeal to them—especially literary novels.

So finally, we get to the MFA style—specifically the Iowa school and its disciples, which produced a number of the more influential American writers of the 20th century (Flannery O'Connor, Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver, etc.). Everybody in the literary scene goes, "Wow this is great!" and they start building workshops around those writers advice and styles, which results in a literary cascade over the decades, vomiting the same ideas and ideals about what lit should be into each other's mouths. When I started looking into American writing guides from the past 20 years, they invariably mention Iowa school writers and stylistic ideas derived from them. Blogs, books, it's all the same. It all goes back to Iowa.

TL;DR
>Why do so many books seem to appeal to the female market?
>Because they're the ones buying them, promote reading to men and boys.
>Why are so many modern literary novels written in similar styles?
>Decades of regurgitating the Iowa Writer's Workshop principles
>When will this change?
>When enough people gibs mone to authors they think are worthwhile and are doing interesting things for publishers to take notice.
>What can I do in the meantime?
>Broaden your horizons by reading non-American authors or investigating specific literary niches.