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My year of writing a trendy book for the masses

If you were planning to write a My Year of Doing Something Singularly Weird or Stupid or Virtuous memoir, you better get those pitches in soon. The LA Times claims the trend is soon to be played out:

They’re not professional pranksters, exactly, but the authors of what might be called gimmick books — memoirs with premises so high-concept they could come from Hollywood pitch meetings: This year, I will take all of my instruction from self-help gurus. Or, this month, I will be radically honest with everyone I meet. Or, today I will try to behave exactly like George Washington, genteel bow, Dudley Do-Right walk and all.

The last few years have also seen many green-themed gimmick books, including Colin Beavan’s new No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process. Gimmicky or not, some have been fabulously successful, and as it gets harder to break into print, the category remains one that publishers invest in.

The article goes on to explore the king of the gimmick genre, A.J. Jacobs. The title of his next book is The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment. He spent 2004 on a quest to become the smartest man, and 2007 taking the Bible literally.

Scott Timberg posits that these stunt books may be the result of the industry’s earlier slew of poor-me suckfest memoirs, the more harrowing the childhood the better. Timberg quotes industry observer Sara Nelson:

“Poor Frank McCourt wouldn’t get published today, I’d bet.” says Nelson, “The dreary Irish childhood recounted in Angela’s Ashes, from 1996, “was pretty horrific, but in an old-fashioned way. Readers have been desensitized to that.”

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