Book genres - becoming very samey

[MrsMiniver1942]

Do you find that once a book comes out and is hailed as fantastic, there are others jumping on the bandwagon so to speak and originality is a bit stifled?

I've just read Northern Boy by Iqbal Hussain straight off the back of The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey. And Mix Tape (although I think that came first). I wonder how many other back in the day Northern towns will feature in upcoming books? I enjoyed all of these.

I noticed it with the 'cosy murder' books by Richard Osman, Richard Coles, and countless others. I haven't read any of these however, but they are really noticeable.

There was a fashion for gothic style books a few years ago. Laura Purcell, Stacey Halls, Bridget Collins ... all the books had very similar covers, gloriously embossed and extravagant and very similar storylines.

And the domestic noir with a twist became oversaturated. How many books were 'the new' Girl on the Train or Gone Girl?

Going back a bit further we had Dan Brown being copied, and I think chick lit really kicked it off in the very late 1990s.

Interested in thoughts and comments.

@Dappy777

Would you mind recommending an Iris Murdoch to get me started? I read a few quotes from her in an article recently and thought she was very interesting.

I know, but she's very popular at the moment....

This has always happened. I remember going into Waterstones a year or so after Twilight first came out and there was a whole section of teen vampire stuff.

and dont get me started on this…..

I agree. He's enjoyable and very clever. I loved the Magpie Murders and its sequels, the Hawthorne series and the 2 Sherlock Holmes books.

Not to mention the group of friends on holiday/at 59th birthday party/wedding/on private island someone gets killed, so it must be someone at the party who did it…

Aren’t Ruth Randall and Barbara Vine the same person?

Yes. Ruth Rendell used the name Barbara Vine for some of her books and didn't hide that it was her. She used different names for different series and different styles of writing.

It's the same with tv and streaming dramas. Netflix or whatever. There are just so many being churned out. They all have similar titles and similar plot summaries that you forget which is which. I just don't bother with most of them.

I presume it's because there's so much competition and all of them are trying to get TikTok traction or whatever social media plugs are current.

Then of course the samey books with samey plots and samey titles and samey covers and typefaces get made into the samey tv adaptations. With the same actors cropping up in them.

Usually the only thing that differs is trying to come up with a new location setting to differentiate.

The Channel 5 dramas are a case in point here.

I agree. Publishers jump on the bandwagon of a successful book and commission new ones in the same genre, including similar covers, so that readers associate the new book with the successful one.

I write novels (women's fiction) and much of the fashion is set by publishers. We were being told a couple of years ago that, as Anne Rice's 'Interview with a Vampire' was being remade for TV, paranormal and vampires were going to be 'big'. The publishers very much go out looking for books that are 'more of the same' as what is currently selling, as they know it will sell.

Also, the more unstable the world becomes, the more readers hunt for predictability in their reading material. So books that take you on a journey without any big surprises become very popular.

Bridget Jones Diary is still being rewritten by other authors specialising in chick lit 30 years on.
"Ditsy young woman with horrible boyfriend gets entangled with a new man who turns out to be The One".

Bridget Jones Diary was itself inspired by P&P.