By: Ryan Nathan

I met Mary Kay Andrews once. She said that she wrote “commercial, pop fiction just to make money.”

We’ve all seen it. Those books you find while waiting in line at the grocery store, at airports, news stands, wherever—it’s all pretty invasive. Commercial fiction. The all too pervasive genre that for the past hundred years has been steadily taking over literature and people’s consciousness, bankrupting society’s knowledge of what many pretentious people call “serious” fiction. And for what reason: Money. It’s the bottom line. Stephen King, James Patterson, Stephanie Meyers, Anne Rice, Mary Kay Andrews, Terry Goodkind, among many, many others. They’re all invested in that bottom line. They don’t care what people take from their books, how vacuously repetitive their books are; all they want is your money. What these authors—if you could call them that—and many like them have done is essentially establish the corporation that is the literary world. A world depleted of originality and good ideas. A world thinly masked by the overuse of adverbs and the Faustian bargain of what it means to be an author.

How did this world come about? Consumers, mainly. People just gave up. T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon. The world, with a collective sigh, just got fed up with writers intentionally trying to challenge the consciousness of what people believed and thought, and they just wanted something that they could complacently sit down to read on a lazy afternoon when there wasn’t anything good on TV. But that’s not to say that the publishers and authors of this contemporary phenomenon aren’t guilty just as well. There wouldn’t be any commercial fiction without these really horrible writers that produce it. And then it wouldn’t be so all-consuming and all-pervasive if these publishing companies didn’t pay top dollar to advertise and get the word out that the next James Patterson book was coming out. But, with everything that’s dictated by Smithian economic principles, the supply only matches up with the demand.

And with books be sold each and every day at exorbitant prices—prices that are absolutely appalling considering a book is merely a bunch of pieces of paper bundled together and give a fancy, laminated cover—people have consistently shown that they’re perfectly willing to throw their money away on absolute garbage, while a majority of these newspaper and magazine reviewers give these authors genuine legitimization to spew their atrocious two-dimensional plots. But hey, when capitalism controls the literary world, what can you do?

That wasn’t a rhetorical question. The answer is quite simple. Don’t buy commercial fiction. Save your money for actual, good books that share a fruitful plot with characters that have tangible depth and have ideas that don’t follow a really horrible formula that a three-year-old could spot. But what I think is most emblematic of this genre is when Tom Clancy sold his name so that now a whole bunch of ghost writers can produce six books a year under his name while he does nothing except rake in publicity and money.