Melville House Books

At a recent public event at England’s Newnham College, Cambridge, novelist Margaret Drabble recounted “tense conversations” with her publishers that led her to believe she was “being dumbed down [because] … there’s an agenda of how it should be in the marketplace.” According to a report by Aida Edemariam on the Guardian‘s book blog, Drabble said “I write literary novels but I can sense my publishers have difficulty in selling me as a genre … whether in literary fiction, or women’s fiction or shopping fiction.” This, in turn, prompted Canada’s leading book blogger — and one of its leading poets to boot — George Murray of Bookninja, to ask, “Are top novelists being rebranded to meet the purchasing habits of an embiggened sector of stupid readers?” Murray proposed a contest, telling readers, “Take your favourite literary novelist and ‘rebrand’ one of their titles to appeal to more popular sectors: chicklit, thriller, romance, sci-fi/fantasy, celebrity kids’ book, etc.” The winning results are here.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.