Have vampires sucked the blood out of chick lit?
Remember when beachin' it meant toting along "Bridget Jones's Diary," "Good in Bed," "Confessions of a Shop-aholic" or anything by Candace Bushnell?
Well, if you're a dedicated chick-lit fan, you'll be packing light this year. Sure, Sophie ("Shopaholic") Kinsella is publishing "40 Love" under her real name, Madeleine Wickham, and Beth Harbison ("Secrets of a Shoe Addict") is bringing out "There's Always Something There to Remind Me." But a smattering of titles doesn't fill a genre.
The truth is, there' ain't a whole lot of chick lit going on these days. Not like back when ...
"There was a period when by the time you read a query for a chick-lit novel, a six-figure auction had been completed," recalls Manhattan literary agent Liza Dawson.
Ah, the era of "Bridget Jones's Diary" by Helen Fielding, "The Other Side of the Story" by Marian Keyes, "Mr. Maybe" by Jane Green, "The Devil Wears Prada" by Laura Weisberger, "Love the One You're With" by Emily Giffin — just to name a few in no particular order.
But while certain brand-name chick-lit writers still have an audience, many have fallen by the wayside. Still, anything that Stephenie Meyer or Charlaine Harris (her Sookie Stackhouse series is the basis for HBO's "True Blood") or Sherrilyn Kenyon (the "Dark-Hunter" series) chooses to write sells and sells.
"A lot of what happened was that there was a reading shift in the age potentially geared to chick lit," says Patricia Bostelman, vice present of marketing for Barnes & Noble. "'Sex and the City' went off the air and the world got darker with the recession. Meanwhile, a wide swath crossed over to the 'Twilight' series."
Sara Nelson, book editor at O magazine, agrees. "There's less emphasis on finding a man, getting a lot of money and Louboutin shoes now. The vibe is a lot funkier," she says. "There are more stories about women coming of age living in Brooklyn than trying to get a Park Ave. apartment."
Rarely, though, do genres just go away. At least not without a fight. Two staunch chick-lit defenders, authors Lisa Steinke and Liz Fenton, who will soon publish an e-book, "The D Word," have declared May to be International Chick Lit Month. They also have a blog toward that end, chicklitisnotdead.com.
"Chick lit has evolved from Cosmos and handbags," says Fenton. "There are divorces, single moms, women making rash decisions."
Her writing partner put it succinctly. "We're two girls who believe in a happy ending. If we could say what the definition of chick lit is, it's a book with a happy ending."
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