Warning: may contain nutso ideas ... Books on sale at Asda. Photograph: Dan Chung
It is difficult to know whether to shudder in dismay or hesitantly applaud HarperCollins's announcement of a new mass market fiction list, AVON, for the "female supermarket shopper" under the banner Real Reads for Real Women.
I don't usually constitute my "reality" by my supermarket shopping skills. Nor do I imagine that the books I write or read are any the realer for their presence amongst tins of baked beans or even saucisson sec and organic parsnips.
But then in the marketing world these days "real" may just mean the opposite of "virtual". And of course we live in a post Net Book Agreement age, where pricing is subject to fierce competition and Amazon not only undercuts but "recommends" titles by cross-referencing your and other people's shopping patterns. Publishers therefore have to go to radical lengths to vie for the purchasing power of we material girls.
Under the editorial aegis of Caroline Ridding - who oversaw supermarket book buying at Tesco's for six years and engineered a four-fold increase in sales before moving to HarperCollins - the new AVON list zeroes in on chick lit, romance, and thrillers. These are the genres the editor dubbed the "second most powerful woman in publishing" has identified as most popular for her audience.
She's setting out to make certain they are. The titles, launched this month, have a tie-in with the celebrity weekly Closer which will run a book club featuring them. There are promotions and prizes. And in a novel departure, each of the "stylishly-packaged" titles, three a month, will carry an icon tick-list on its back cover, as DVDs do. At a quick glance, you'll be able to tell just how much "humour, sex, love, drama, thrills and terror can be found in each book".
This may well start a new trend in tick lists. I can see the non-genre categories now, identifying just how much thinking, reflection, politics, ideas, hazard to mental and emotional health any given volume contains. Well, we are in a supermarket.
"Books are entertainment," states Ridding. Indeed, they have long been. They have also been more and other, and one can only wish that the supermarket shelves also contained, like the best bookshops, the "more and other" bit, perhaps labelled with a guarantee to "make you think real thoughts".
That said, I imagine my agent is already queueing up to make sure that Caroline Ridding takes a good look at the "real reads for real women" I and her other authors can be packaged into. Hope those shiny covers carry a label noting that they are also bio-degradable, meet European regulations, and will make your fat-free brain fit.
