Online flak at reading survey
A writer says she was “dumped on from a great height” by the literary establishment about a report on why people are not reading Kiwi fiction.
Catherine Robertson had hoped a Book Council report co-authored with writer Paula Morris would get people thinking about why they weren’t reading Kiwi fiction.
“We were excited to see what kind of response it would get,” Robertson said. What happened instead, in her own words, was a “s*** storm”.
Media “latched on” to the doom and gloom angle of 75 per cent of survey participants finding it “dark”, “grim”, “depressing”, “gloomy”, “overrated” and “boring”, but struggling to say why, Robertson said.
Critics online called the report a “big pile of anecdotes” and said the council was failing at its role of promoting New Zealand literature.
Victoria University Press publisher Fergus Barrowman told the Herald on
Sunday he thought the survey didn’t have anything new or useful to say.
Romance writer Brynn Kelly tweeted the problem was “mainstream and genre writers are largely ignored . . . and readers aren’t aware of diversity”. New York Times bestselling Kiwi author Nalini Singh, agreed.
Robertson said the reaction left her feeling beleaguered and said many of the reports’ critics hadn’t read it.
Book Council chief executive Catriona Ferguson was happy the report hit a chord. “We’re delighted it has got the discussion out there. There is so much talent that gets overlooked,” she said.
To combat the problem, the council was looking at advertising and marketing campaigns. Advocates also needed to be used to push Kiwi fiction, she said.
But not all Kiwi fiction misses the mark.
Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker prizewinning The Luminaries is 6th on Neilsen Bookscan’s list of the 10 most-sold books here since 2009.