When Popular Fiction Isn’t Popular: Genre, Literary, and the Myths of Popularity | Electric Literature

But what I'd like to focus on is the oddly persistent myth that genre fiction is "popular fiction" and that literary fiction is pointless and obscure. Or, as Jennifer Weiner regularly argues, that book critics and literary awards overlook the kind of fiction that real readers actually like. The idea even comes up in intra-genre wars, such as when the conservative SF Sad Puppies-who caused the biggest stir in science fiction this year by organizing a coordinated Hugo voting campaign-argued that science fiction is being destroyed by books "long on ‘literary' elements" and short on what makes science fiction "popular."

There is an odd cognitive dissonance that happens in these conversations, where we are simultaneously supposed to believe that literary fiction is "mainstream fiction" and genre fiction is "ghettoized," and also that literary fiction is a niche nobody reads while genre authors laugh all the way to the bank. Throw into the mix a recent Wall Street Journal article on the increasingly practice of giving million dollar advances to literary debut novels, and you can see that the truth of the matter is pretty unclear.