Why so many novels are just words.

This is me with my reader's hat on for a change, rather than news about writing.

I have just switched off an interview with yet another traditionally published British novelist, private school education, former journalist, and as so often happens, from the colonies, this one Kenya.

No wonder their books are all the same, and so formulaic. They are all the same people, and then you find so many people in publishing are from this background too. Mummy and Daddy allowed them to climb the rungs of the journalistic ladder, which was prohibitive to most people because the posts are either lowly paid or not paid at all. They set the standards for what is acceptable or not acceptable for published fiction, and set the barriers too.

Their comfortable lives allowed them the luxury of writing novels, without the worries and financial needs suffered by most people. They then had the right connections to ease them down the path of publishing. All jolly nice. A very comfortable and exclusive club.

Is this going to change? Now we have indie publishing, which gives anybody at least more of a chance than they used to have. Journalism no longer employs such vast numbers of people, so although the route into journalism is possibly more prohibitive than ever, with unpaid internships now the norm to get into the better positions, it is a shrinking world. Logic says fewer writers of novels will emerge from this sausage machine as the journalistic empire grows smaller.

I do hope this is good news for we readers of fiction, because by the time you get to my age, so many novels are tiresome. You read them, and some aspects of the story satisfy your need to read, but you cannot shake off the feeling that you are travelling down the same worn-out conveyor belt of words, just a different time, different place, and different characters. Fundamentally, they are all the same, because only those books tick the boxes to get published, and only those writers have the right connections to get published. It is self-sustaining mediocrity.

If you look at what is said by so many agents and publishers, they spout the same tired old phrase that they are looking for new voices, but that is simply not true at all. They have been looking for the same formulaic voices for decades, with an aversion to trying anything new. This is what they have been trained to do, and this is what they feel is safe.

If you genuinely want to find new voices, then indie publishing is the place to look, not the tired old world of privileged journalists. These are still early days, and finding these new voices is still challenging, but perhaps the change to finding your next book using the new option of Ai searches rather than traditional methods will allow these new voices to be read? Instead of browsing in the same old way, you can now ask Google or wherever you prefer to search for exactly what you want to read next – find me books of Viking adventure set in England, or whichever search takes your fancy. Yes, the big publishers will still have the resources to skew the results to favour their products, but perhaps there will be more chance for genuinely good books from unknown authors to become visible too.

I do hope so, because I want more from a novel than just words, I want a story, and I am tired of reading the same story over and over again.

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