How can you tell if a book is literary or commercial? Fiction tends to fall into either one of those camps. Sometimes the author thinks she wrote something literary, but publishers see it as commercial. So how can you tell?
Well, there are no hard and fast rules, but we know it when we see it. And so do you. If you are an author, you probably can’t be objective about your own work, but when you read something by someone else, you get a gut feeling of where it belongs.
It has to do with quality, yes. There is always a place for quality. Good writing certainly plays a part. But there is something more—an attitude, a piece of wisdom, a sense of wit—that makes it rise above. Let me give you an example. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is a quality book, and it’s also a very commercial book, even though it is considered a great work of literature. It’s commercial because it’s so easy to read and so entertaining. But it still has that spark, that extra something that moves it into a larger field. It is universal, it has depth, and the character is so real that people used to believe they saw him on the street.
I know a few pages in at the most if what I’m reading is literary or commercial. We love it when something hits that sweet spot in the middle—where it’s wildly readable, but also very high quality, and maybe it doesn’t matter in the end.
What does matter is how will it sell.
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