I happened to be staying with a friend while furiously (pun?) reading BREAKING DAWN, the fourth and final book in the Twilight series, which meant I didn’t really see much of my friend. In one of my brief pauses in reading, though, at about 4 AM, he asked me why I thought vampires are all the rage.
Photo from the West Warwick Public Library
I gave him a very supply-side answer: Parts of the publishing industry are in crisis, I said. October was the biggest month ever for bookstores returning stock to publishers.* Some small presses are folding altogether. Borders is bankrupt but still operational, and massively cutting down on the number (and hence, variety) of books it carries so it can face more covers outward on the shelf.
“Midlist” authors (i.e., everyone who’s not the big bestsellers — nobody ever talks about “bottom-list”) are getting fewer promotional resources; if you don’t happen to have the backing of an enthusiastic small press that pumps their efforts into it, good luck getting a book tour as a smaller-name author.**
In this context, I said, we should expect a lot more copycatting. Publishers are desperate to find the next big bestseller. So once TWILIGHT was such a hit, the incredible vampire glut we’re in now was inevitable.***
Fine, he said, but why was TWILIGHT such a hit? Why vampires? Is there something about the craziness of right now, with its wars and economic insecurity, that gives young people a death lust, or what?
For that, I did not have a good answer. Hence, the Friday “Why?”. What do y’all think?
* Here’s an explanation of the completely insane system of bookstore returns the entire publishing industry operates under. [Caveat: I hesitated to link to this blog because the blogger has written some posts I found really offensive; specifically, at least two where she labels any criticism of the Israeli state, or support for Palestinian self-determination, as anti-Semitic. But it is a good explanation of what happened to the publishing industry in October 2008, which was the first big wake-up call of how this current economic depression may affect publishing. (Not the last word, though; Amazon's sales are up 18% this month... cheap entertainment and all?) So I'm linking it with this caveat so readers can decide for themselves whether they want to click.]
** Incidentally, everything I said above is all the more reason to support independent publishers you like, if you value diversity of ideas. Myself, I work with Haymarket Books (which, by the way, is one of the enthusiastic small presses that does tour its authors). Among other things, on a project you’ll be hearing much more about on this blog soon.
*** Even if that means publishing endless terrible, terrible books. VAMPIRE ACADEMY, I’m still looking at you!
-->Feed me text
February 6, 2009 at 12:16 pm
I don’t have much of an answer to why vampires are so popular, but I think your point about chasing the bucks is strongly paralleled by Hollywood’s obsession with comic book/graphic novel movies. The success of Spider Man and X-Men and now the newer Batman movies have spawned a mountain of trashtastic others (the Incredible Hulk, Spider Man 3, etc etc).
On another note, while I know it’s not young adult or teen, I am really pumped to read Octavia Butler’s last novel, Fledgling, which happens to be a vampire novel. I haven’t delved too deeply into the genre, but her awesome destruction of taboos and prejudices based on race, religion, love, and sexuality make this a must read. See the Washington Post review: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/27/AR2005102701789.html
February 6, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Very interesting. I think the supply-side theory is right on, along with the observation that trends are very sticky, until they are not–there will be nearly insatiable demand among young adult readers for vampire books until the trend is over, then demand will shift to the next big thing. Publishing houses are being inundated with terrible copycat vampire manuscripts–along with manuscripts about subjects in the same vein as vampires–and thus their marginal costs to publish vampire books (which they know will sell) is relatively low.
February 6, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Interesting point, MAP, about how a glut of vampire manuscripts being submitted can also affect what publishers publish. It sounds sort of obvious, but most publishing-related blogs I read are written from the perspective either of ‘gatekeepers’ (agents and editors), or writers who’ve struggled to get past the gatekeepers, and they’re all pitched at telling individual would-be authors how to get their book published. And of course, if there are a ton of vampire novels being submitted, that might be bad for your individual vampire novel’s chances, and yet the chance that *some* vamp novel makes the cut grows.
It also seems like there’s an element of the general tendency for markets to produce booms and slumps: everyone knows the vampire market can crash, but no one wants to (or can afford to?) be the one who missed out on the vampire boom in the meantime.
February 6, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I think that attributing the current trend of “vampires are cool” to a sign of a shift in the zeitgeist is too easy. Just the other day, someone was making a similar argument regarding zombies (“Suddenly Everyone is talking about zombies!”). Now, yes, I realize that there hasn’t been a sudden influx of zombie young adult literature, but I find it too simplistic to connect vampire angst with economic angst.
Also, it is not as if vampires have suddenly come on the scene. Vampire angst and pop culture have a long history (Buffy, Anne Rice, etc). With the success of Twilight and True Blood, both of which are book series which have been dramatized and hyped, combined with cross-promotion with teen stores such as Hot Topic, publishers are trying to jump on the bandwagon. Similarly, Harry Potter started a slew of magical school books.
For these publishers’ sakes, I hope the trend doesn’t implode too soon. They could use all business they can get right now.
February 10, 2009 at 11:14 pm
The thing is, vampires were already an extremely popular, lucrative, and growing subgenre in romance novels long before Twilight. And, as much as everyone who thinks they are too educated/liberal/cool to read romance novels does not want to admit, Twilight is nothing more than a romance novel. Meyers did not kickstart the trend, she just jumped on the bandwagon and had massive success by marketing to teens instead of to adults. Since adults (at least, the younger ones, will read YA (re:this blog), but most teens will not read adult romance, this allowed her to reach a much bigger audience than she would have if she had marketed her mormon-religion-requiring sexless vampire novel as a standard romance.
I think the appeal of the vampire subgenre can really be summed up by this quote from one of Maggie Shayne’s Wings in the Night series’ books (1st published in 1993 – long before Meyers). When asked why she isn’t married, the side-kick character responds, “till death do you part doesn’t really mean anything when you’re immortal.” (I may be slightly misquoting this as I do not have the book at my apartment.) What’s better than love and marriage? Eternal love. An this message is just as appealing to teens as it is to adults. Even this message is reflected in Bella’s lack of desire to get married.
I’m not disputing the fact the Meyers spurred/spawned a craze of insane teens willing to invest themselves in vampire lore (http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/1214/), but she was by no means the first and I don’t think that you can make the argument that the topic is some type of metaphor for the current state of the world, when the topic has been popular both previous and contiguous to Meyers books. I will buy the argument that publishers are publishing in a timid, only-print-what-will-sell manner, but I don’t think Meyers is responsible. I think she’s just the greatest example of the trend, not the trendsetter.
February 12, 2009 at 9:41 am
Y’all are really improving my confidence in my original answer, here. Good points all.
Olivia, I think your point about the significance of immortality makes a lot of sense. But it’s funny, because now that I think about it, I guess I find mortal love stories a lot more romantic.
I mean, if you’re going to live forever, how much does it really matter that you spend these years with this person or that person? Whereas if you only have a certain amount of time in the world, there’s a cost to any way you spend it. I think that has a lot more potential to romance because it asks, what makes it worth it?
And then this brings us back to the main things that ultimately broke my TWILIGHT love, namely: that neither Edward nor, especially, Bella, appears to have any desires about how to spend their eternity (except “with each other”), and this is portrayed as romantic instead of pathetic and boring; that, once the initial mystery is gone, we don’t have any sense of why the characters actually want to be together, we’re just told over and over and over that they really, really do (in that sense, this is my same complaint about VAMPIRE ACADEMY); and that, for all that the books go on about Edward’s sense of sacrifice and restraint, he doesn’t actually have to make any hard choices at all.
So Meyer fills that in with paternalism instead (his hard choice is letting Bella make any decisions for herself!), she does some bizarre “characterization” to try to justify this (Bella’s uniquely clumsy and that’s why Edward can’t “let” her do anything a normal girl would do!), and it’s real bad.
February 16, 2009 at 12:51 pm
[...] that’s been about half of young adult, and can I just say that I’d tried to explain the preponderance of vampires to my boyfriend, but he didn’t really get it, so I made him stroll through Barnes and [...]
March 20, 2009 at 12:27 am
Just as a follow up, here’s an article I read today on the politics of vampires, specifically, vampires as an expression of bourgeois angst and how the True Blood series is apparently reversing this. And now I really want to watch that show, which is frankly the absolute last thing that I need. Damn you, Helen Scott, with incessant reviews of TV shows I subsequently decide I must watch.