Bookplanet: new niches in publishing (like women older than 45)

Here one Jessa Crispin Scratches a Niche:

"Soon the publishing industry will have one imprint for every man, woman and child in America. It’s not that far off. It seems that Dan Brown has monopolized the whole “runaway success” concept, so all that’s left to make money with is the nichification of literature.

"Thus, there is now Transita, an imprint devoted to women 45 and older. And if you’re a woman between the ages of 20 and 35, you can find yourself in either Red Dress or Downtown Press books, but only if you’re single. It’s very trendy to be a conservative right now, and there are several imprints to choose from. Liberals have different imprints at the same publishers, but you’ll have to wait a while to become hip again. Struggling with fertility issues? Not only are there dozens of books, both fiction and nonfiction, to help you through your troubled time, you now have an entire magazine, called Conceive.

"Even the niches have niches. Chick lit breaks down into Latina chick lit, African-American chick lit, older woman chick lit, dick lit—which may be written by men, but is still geared towards women—and now fat-girl chick lit. If you have weight issues, get ready for books to regurgitate your dieting struggles, because the weight loss memoir, all of them written by young women, is very hot right now. It’s also a good time to be a knitter, with books on how to knit, how to form knitting groups, chick lit about friends who knit, even a spiritual guide with knitting metaphors. Any day now, the book about knitting for women who are overweight will hit the market. I’m sure of it.

"Most of these books are trash, of course, and they’ll all soon hit the remainder bin, with something else to replace them. But the nichification has caused certain books that deserve wide audiences to be marketed to a very specific and limiting demographic. Take, for instance, Paula Kamen’s All in My Head: An Epic Quest to Cure an Unrelenting, Totally Unreasonable, and Only Slightly Enlightening Headache. It’s a well-researched, well-written, fascinating nonfiction book as much about the history of the treatment of pain as a personal story, but it’s being marketed as a memoir with a self-help bent. It’s being publicized on chronic-pain support-group websites, and on Salon.com, it was reviewed, in one of the only mainstream reviews, by a man married to a chronic-pain sufferer. Everything about the marketing scheme screams, “This book is for chronic pain sufferers and the people who love them!” Yet it’s worthy of a much wider audience.

"I guess I’ll just wait for my own imprint to tell me what to read. It shouldn’t be long until I’m marketed to as a woman in her late ’20s, cohabitating in a major urban area but with a small-town background, who has cats, a TiVo, and a wacky next door neighbor on whom she occasionally has to call the cops. I’m sure they’ll come up with something great for me."

SHE left out the religious niche, which many secular publishers are getting into. There's big money to be made off God. In related news, controversial academic Yale Professor Craphogger has started an imprint for men who never get laid, under the name "The Wanton Dick Eternally Unsatisfied." The market potential is boundless. The first volume is the memoir of a man who spends all his days on internet sex sites, called "The Internet and my Right Hand."