...but you can't make this kind of stuff up.
You want painful lives? Check out celebrities.
But, seriously. I have ZERO clue who is going to walk up and WANT to read about painful lives. And since B&N is now dividing the YA section into genres... are we going to have this now?? Because what is YA lit if it isn't sometimes... painful?
Weird. Weird, weird, weird.
7 comments:
REALLY? And I always had such a high opinion of Waterstones (probably by virtue of favorable comparison with U.S. chains, but still).
HA! Painful Lives.
Painful Lives right next to celebrities. Sad but true too often.
So is Painful Lives a subsection of Celebrities or are they two different sections altogether? I'm just hating the name of that category. What a crappy reduction. You may think you're writing a triumph of the human spirit/confront your personal demons type novel only to find out, nope, it's Painful Lives. Is it just me or does that sound like a Smiths B-side that they would have changed the title of before releasing because they released it was crap?
Oh, would it not be horrible to discover, as an author, that they'd shelved your book in "Painful Lives?" *shudder*
I'm afraid Painful Lives is its very own thing, Kel. And yeah, it would seriously be upsetting to have your opus reduced to such a throwaway phrase - painful lives. As if everyone's isn't occasionally.
Sarah, Waterstones is just Barnes & Noble with a post code, not a zip code.
I hate to say this, but traditionally stories about suffering have been considered something that women "relate to," at any rate, if not actually enjoy reading. Until pretty recently women's magazines often carried "ordeal stories," true stories of women's ordeals with dying children, sick or cheating husbands, their own ill health, experiences with natural disasters, etc. They may still do it. In the '70s and '80s "disease of the week" made-for-TV movies were common in this country, and they were almost always about women.
I could go on.
My point is that my guess is that with "Painful Lives" someone is trying to sell to that stereotypical women's market.
Gail--great point. It reminds me of when I was a teenager and read YM, and they started running a recurring feature with readers' true embarrassing horror stories. Well, allegedly true...
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