"On more than one occasion a practical joke crosses the line into sexual harassment"

After The Independent on Sunday offered advice on how to break into the Mills & Boon market they followed their Blagger's Guide with a headline wondering, 'Have We Fallen Out of Love with Chick-Lit?' It appears a worrying trend has developed in the book-buying business that has little to do with the general decline in book sales, the move to electronic-reading devices or the current worldwide recession that has adversely affected the sales of most items. In fact, this new phenomenon seems to have a whole lot to do with women no longer handing over cash in exchange for a pink novel jacket with drawings of cocktails, stilettos and cupcakes on it. Has the boom gone from the romance market and what horrors does this spell for female purveyors of shallow consumerism, the romantic minority terrified of reality, handsome, arrogant billionaires searching for a bride, or even a Bewildered Heart? Will no one think of us Bewildered Hearts?

According to Bookseller, the people responsible for how and why we sell books, 'Sales of the most recent novels by commercial women's authors are all down by more than 20 per cent on their previous mass-market publications over comparative sales periods. Victims include Marian Keyes, whose latest novel The Brightest Star in the Sky has sold 260,000 copies since February, down 42 per cent on her previous book. Jodi Picoult's Harvesting the Heart is down almost 50 per cent on her previous novel, and Veronica Henry's The Birthday Party recorded a 71 per cent slump to 16,479 copies.' Those books look terrible, but in an enduringly popular way, so what is to blame for this disconcerting plunge, besides the obvious reasons already stated? If the economy was solely responsible then a similar downturn would be noticeable across other genres, yet, 'Women's commercial fiction was under-performing compared to the rest of the book market with the top 20 commercial women's fiction authors down 10 per cent in like-for-like sales for their most recent mass-market title against the previous novel. Overall, the fiction market has fallen by 8 per cent.'

That's a margin of a staggering two per-cent, which we can only assume is enough to warrant an alarmist newspaper report forcing women to give up their literary careers and focus on growing industries, such as debt management. What's the cause of all this? Can we somehow place blame on retail conglomerates who are ultimately to blame for everything? 'The decline has been blamed on a squeeze on supermarket spending, with retailers drastically reducing the number of titles they order and a shift to digital books sales.' While it is easy to credit technology as an explanation, literary experts have an entirely different response, which is immensely uplifting, as analysis from literature scholars always is. 'Literary experts believe that readers are rejecting the identically-jacketed "sex, shoes and shopping" tales pushed by publishers in favour of more complex, psychologically-ambitious novels by women writers.' There you are, the future of romance is complexity and psychological-ambition. You heard it here eventually.

The reaction from authors of sex, shoes and shopping stories was immediate and predictable. While they do tend to write about sex, shoes and shopping, they do so in a complex and psychologically-ambitious way, so they shouldn't be considered chick-lit writers and therefore their sales cannot have slumped. The article quotes Eithne Farry, the literary editor of Marie Claire magazine (Search fruitlessly for Marie Claire's literary section here), who blames patronising marketing campaigns. 'Chick lit has become a derogatory term. I'm surprised when I see that a lot of books are sold in covers with shoes and cupcakes because often the subject matter of the book inside isn't frothy and frivolous.' Furthermore, says The Independent on Sunday, 'The backlash against "chick lit" resulted in the author Polly Courtney publicly dropping her publisher, HarperCollins, in protest at the "condescending and fluffy" sleeves they had chosen for her books.' But why ruin such a good thing, Polly Courtney? 'The implication with chick-lit is that it's about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams.' This narrow-minded implication was not enough for Courtney's aspirations as she saw herself belonging to an alternative market where the covers have a multitude of colour options and a vast library of potential photographs. Her new book is entitled It's a Man's World and deals with social issues such as sexism in the workplace, thus alleviating it above books about love to the real concerns of society.

Of course, chick-lit is a genre of fiction written by and for women, the term itself was coined in the 1980s as the literary equivalent of the chick-flick, a motion picture genre typically about women meeting their ideal man, or occasionally about women on cross-country crime sprees that end in empowering suicide to a rock anthem. The books are best-served by the occasional generous review, which claim novels such as Something Borrowed, or Bridget Jones' Diary by Helen Fielding, 'explore the conflict between the independence enjoyed by young, professional singletons and the emotional security offered by a partner.' Any book can be written up to sound socially-conscious, but romance fiction has often declared itself content to satisfy a reader yearning for light entertainment and a happy ending, such as Robertson Davies in one of his moods.

Here is a genre defined by the lazy way it is marketed rather than the lazy way much of it is written. During its heyday the publishing companies saw a blossoming market and followed a carefully-constructed advertising campaign that has proven successful ever since. Was this success born out of the time, the neurotic, but financially-prosperous nineties and naughts? Now the public have retained their neuroses, but their money has disappeared and the world suddenly seems psychologically-complex. Should publishers find a way to cash-in on this current sense of doom and insolvency? As we have learnt from our years of Mills & Boon research the author is often as powerless over cover, picture and publicity as the likes of Polly Courtney, so for the writers themselves what will be the next step, and may we discover this failure brings about a blessing disguised as a cupcake hidden inside a stiletto?

As Kathy Lette points out, 'Men who write first person, social satire, like Nick Hornby and David Nicholls and co, are compared to Chekhov. While women authors get pink covers and condescension.' While this is likely the first time Hornby and Nicholls have ever been favourably mentioned in the same sentence as Chekhov, there remains a double standard in the manner with which authors of modern fiction are sold to the public. Those writing 'first person, funny, feminist fiction' have been relegated to a sneered-at niche of women writing about women for women, often using alliteration. Seeking a remedy Lette senses an opportunity within this decline in sales. 'Many 'chick lit' books are just Mills & Boon with Wonderbras, with the heroines waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining Armani. So, perhaps, in this economic downturn, a creative cull may ensure that only literary lionesses prevail.'

How a Mills & Boon novel would differentiate depending on the quality of its breast-supporting undergarment might remain a mystery until Kathy Lette writes a frothy comedy on the subject, but perhaps this crisis might lead to a revaluation of the wider genre, allowing writers to escape the trappings of their publicists, and the end of second-rate story-telling that has caused the tarnishing of chick-lit since its critical and commercial pinnacle? Beyond that, Lette has asked for the genre to be renamed clit-lit, although what this refers to Bewildered Heart has no idea. Instead, we would call for the end of superficial labelling altogether and merely a new construction of literature separated arbitrarily by the novel's bra-size. Therefore most Mills & Boon's would not be Wonder-Bras, but instead high-street lingerie; frivolous, good-looking, but likely to fall apart under close scrutiny.