Commercial vs Literary Fiction

hello everyone elects done here and today I'm going to be talking about commercial versus literary fiction these are buzzwords I've thrown around in plenty of videos and I thought I should probably actually define them because it might not be completely obvious what the difference is but understanding the difference between commercial and literary fiction can definitely help you in terms of strategizing with your writing and this industry so in a nutshell commercial fiction is widely appealing it has high sales potential mainstream potential potential to reach a ton of people often it's high-concept which is a whole other thing I will do a video talking about what is high concept but think of it as very pitch Apple broadly appealing very kind of easy to be like ah yes I get that I want to read it very often commercial fiction is very fast-paced it's meant to be read quickly by a big audience on the other hand literary fiction tends to prioritize writing style character low concept over commercial high concept literary fictions going to focus on style as I mentioned theme kind of artistic exploration of ideas and literary fiction by its nature compared to commercial fiction is far less commercial everyone's style there's a huge break out literary hit and it can become commercial fiction but ultimately the numbers on literary fiction are always going to be much much smaller now very important disclaimer I'm talking about either or a versus but there's plenty in between commercial literary fiction it's not either/or all the time as I mentioned some literary fiction can be commercial and there's also all the stuff in between there's genre fiction and you can have literary genre fiction the literary snobs would disagree with me and part of the whole problem of being like literary fiction is the idea of literary fiction comes out of the development of fiction in general and commercial fiction and snobbery honestly which is a whole other conversation but that is just to say that just being like there's commercial fiction and there's a literary fiction and that's it can be incredibly limiting but it is good to know about these opposing categories of fiction at the end of the day the most important thing you need to know about commercial versus literary fiction is commercial fiction is broadly appealing and can make a ton of money and literary fiction tends to be a specific style of writing and is more niche and has more limited commercial scope also very good to know from a career perspective so quite obviously if you haven't figured out the money is going to be very different between commercial fiction and literary fiction also because the volume is going to be very different between commercial fiction and literary fiction commercial fiction writers tend to be on that book a year model because the readership wants a book a year also usually not always commercial fiction I hesitate to say is easier to write because all books are tricky to write but typically commercial fiction writers learn to write faster and it is true when you're writing a quicker paced book and you're not as focused on kind of style and the artistic stuff it can go faster and honestly though I actually think it's more the difference of what the two are allowed to do I think commercial writers have been forced to learn to write faster and it then seems like it must be easier to write those books I think there's tons of inherent challenges in writing quality commercial fiction I mean I'm a commercial fiction writer it's never easy whereas on the literary side I think those writers are allowed to take their sweet time to write their beautiful opuses and I think literary fiction isn't inherently better than commercial fiction or really inherently harder but they typically take more time publishers allow the writers to take more time to write them so a literary fiction writer can take three four five plus years between books and it's not a death knell for their career whereas the commercial writer is going to run into a huge problem because part of the brand of being a commercial fiction writer is to publish consistently so that your readership has more books so that's kind of a difference between them but here's the thing unless you break out as a literary fiction writer you're never gonna make much money and even if you break out it's rare by break out I mean like you have a literary hit and then it's that weird crossover of like well wait it's a literary novel but it was commercially successful and then those literary authors can get massive advances from their publishers because let's say they won big awards and so like there's a cachet to them so their publisher is willing to pay them and also they are now a literary breakout so then it's that nebulous line between literary and commercial generally speaking literary writing writing literary novels is a long haul and it's usually not lucrative commercial fiction really runs the gamut you can make not a lot of money in commercial fiction or you can make a ton of money on commercial fiction generally the most wealthy and successful authors are writing commercial fiction they're writing those big books that they can get seven figures for and hundreds of thousands of people buy them because they are broadly appealing so those are the main differences I personally don't think one is better than the other I love a good literary novel but I primarily read commercial fiction they are certainly more entertaining in many ways and easier to digest I just love high-concept fiction but yeah oh god it's like getting your teeth into like a really good literary novel there's nothing like it what I also find really fascinating if you really think about it a lot of our beloved classics were not considered literary at the time that they were released meaning they weren't considered to have literary merit because they were popcorn fiction for the masses so it's so funny that we might go oh well Jane Austen is so literary Dickens they were considered commercial fiction writers at the time so it's really funny the idea of what is commercial does change well it's commercial if it makes a ton of money and appeals to a lot of people so just kind of interesting but yes for the purposes of you getting into the industry and watching this channel I talk about commercial fiction all the time because I am a commercial fiction writer most people are striving to be commercial fiction writers and that is kind of way the money and the career is and just generally why is the Corsa category and that is my category so there's the distinction for you commercial fiction versus literary fiction there's lots of nuances to it it's so much more than I've covered here I mean literary fiction really is its own beast and there's a lot of snobbery and elitism the factors into that side of things but yeah commercial is pretty straightforward broadly appealing books that can make a lot of money so I just thought I would go into more detail on those two because I realized I dropped those words all the time and had never actually talked about them in detail give this video a thumbs up if you liked it I will make more videos kind of explaining some of the buzz words that come up on my channel all the time and if you're not already subscribed to the channel go ahead and do that I post new videos two to three times a week thank you so much for watching and as always guys happy writing

Channel: Alexa Donne

Views: 12,710

Rating: 4.9285712 out of 5

Keywords: alexa donne, author tube, writing advice, how to write a book, publishing advice, literary fiction, commercial fiction

Id: NQiA1QJmJGQ

Length: 7min 23sec (443 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2019