Book conversation with the "girls"

Now some of you who know me, well and if anyone other than the people who know read this blog you will see that I hang out with a pretty young crowd of women. So I have been asking them hard questions about the books they read and why they read them.

Books they consider in the top five for this year:
Northern Lights by Nora Roberts
Bleachers by John Grisham
The Wedding by Nicholas Sparks
The Guardian by Nicholas Sparks
The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

Second question posed to the young readers (age 22-31) five girls
Do you read category romance:
1. they answered no
2. I asked why not?
Because we want more of a story line than just boy meets girl. They want lots of knee jerk emotion, they want someone to make them cry, laugh, and generally feel good about their world. However there are strings attached to this. Two of them will buy whatever Nicholas Sparks, Nora Roberts & J.D. Robb without even looking at a blurb.

Now,
These are girls who grew up in the "Buffy" generation as I call them, but they are active. They like sports, they do not sit home all day and just read, read, read, and muse, muse, muse.

So they need a fast paced story when they read. They like action, hard core suspense and they get their romance from that. They do not feel cheated. All of them love Southern fiction.

Rachel is addicted to Jennifer Cruise, and a couple of others and when I told her those were romance she said Uh-uh. They buy their books at Target, Wal-mart, and the grocery store. They buy their books while they are shopping for shampoo & Tooth paste, and under arm deodorant. I said why don't you go to a bookstore? Response: Who has time to do that but only once a month.

I think all of these things really lead into why perhaps the romance market per say might be having a rough time of it right now. Somehow, they are going to have to make some of these things more accessible. I told several of them that they could download books onto a PDA and they were floored. Fictionwise carries all most all of the NYT Best sellers. Two of the girls said they are going to look into it. Bottom line? They want something to hold in their hands, they want the smell of ink on paper. These are our new readers folks...so we better listen up!

Hugs,
Michelle