Literary clickbait

Come, fishy fishy... come bite the hook, fishy fishy...

A young couple in sixteenth-century costume are sitting in a boat on the water, the man has a fishing rod in his hand. Chromotypograph after Louis Leloir. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark

Hook, line, and sinker

I doubt there’s a demographic more susceptible to falling for clickbait than Authors Online. The latest piece to cause their outrage is titled “The curse of the cool girl novelist”, by some Charlotte Stroud¹. This write-up is so clearly intended to bait writers and adjacent literati that it is laughable. And yet it succeeded, doing the rounds on social media, outrage-shared non-stop, driving a lot of traffic to the New Statesman, home to other masterpieces such as “The decline of the Literary Bloke”, by a Will Lloyd, and I’m sure there are more but life is too short to find out.

I guess that Stroud’s mischievous job works because she has accurately identified certain tendencies in contemporary indie literature: the ubiquity of over-educated, depressed and alienated characte…