On an Australian TV show, thriller writer Lee Child suggested that writers such as Ian McEwan and other “literary” sorts are terribly jealous of commercial novelists like himself because “they know in their heart that we could write their books but they cannot write our books.”
He further suggested that he could write a Martin Amis novel in “three weeks”, though he never actually set aside three weeks to prove his point, and plus such a novel would only sell “three thousand copies” (unlike a real Martin Amis novel). Though Child insisted that the rivalry between literary and genre “is not necessarily about sales” he went on to say “…if you were a literary author starving in a garret and you had the chance to turn out a Bryce Courtenay and make yourself a multi-millionaire so your family was looked after forever, why wouldn’t you do that? Of course you would.”
Check out the full post, with numbers, here.
