The Fields of Popular Fiction

Abstract

Popular fiction is an immense but nonetheless distinctive literary field and, rather like literary fiction—to which it is often contrasted—it has its representative authors, those who seem to encapsulate everything that gives that field definition. The American writer James Patterson is a good contemporary example. Patterson has published around 100 novels since 1976: high, regular output in a popular genre (detective fiction, for example) is one measurement of this particular field’s good health. It also helps if an author sells a lot of copies, assisted by some aggressive and effective publicity and distribution; something that has in fact been a feature of the popular fictional field for some considerable time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Patterson is also an experienced and successful advertising executive ‘who knows a thing or two about branding’ (Wood 2009). Literary fiction can sometimes sell very well indeed, of course, but popular fiction can lay immediate claim to large chunks of the fictional marketplace. ‘Of all the hardcover fiction sold in the U.S. in 2013,’ an article in Vanity Fair tells us, ‘books by Patterson accounted for one out of every 26.’ This article goes on to speak of a ‘global thriller industry’ and characterises Patterson as ‘the Henry Ford of books’ (Purdum 2015). The New York Times Magazine similarly notes that since 2006 ‘one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson’; it calls him ‘James Patterson Inc.’ as if, in the world of popular fiction, author and company can seem to be one and the same thing (Mahler 2010). Literary fiction, by contrast, is rarely if ever regarded as a matter of industrial or corporate production.