What is meant by "literary or commercial fiction" ?

Question

I keep seeing this when agents list their interests. For example: "Literary and commercial fiction, historical fiction, women's fiction, thrillers, mysteryies, young adult..."

Would that mean any fiction? Would literary and commercial fiction by chance mean fantasy or sci fi?

Answer 1

The link below describes each type of 'fiction'.

http://www.agentquery.com/genre_descriptions.aspx

Answer 2

Literary fiction is fiction that tries to be art. Commercial fiction, or "pop fiction" is made to produce income. Some authors switch between the two so that they can make a decent income.

Answer 3

Literary and commercial fiction is the "everything else" genre of fiction. For other genres, it's easy to define what they are, and generally their authors will tell you. Sci-fi/fantasy wouldn't be fall into the literary and commercial genre because it has it's own genre.

Answer 4

Contrary to popular belief this usage is not lazy or indecent nor is it as recent as many of you seem to think. At least as far back as the time of the American Revolution pls or plz was used in place of please in correspondence , again after the introduction of the telegraph, and most recently with the advent of text messaging, and all for the same reason, cost. During the early days of our country both paper and ink were expensive, so there were accepted methods of abbreviation to cram as much information into a letter as possible pls (or plz) was one example of this. When sending telegrams you were charged by the word (as in typing every 5 characters not actual words) so once again pls was used (among many other shortcuts u for you and so on) to make the sending of a message as cost effective as possible. As for text messaging, when first introduced, you may recall, we were charged per message we sent, so cutting letters out of messages meant a single text could be sent instead of two. It became a habit that carried over onto the internet, even though the need for the abbreviation no long exists,,,,to be fair though I am fairly sure you type OK or okay instead of Orl Korrekt which is the widely accepted original phrase the abbreviation came from, so can you really cast stones?

Answer 5

I think that it is the same of films: commercial films. It's a less cost and the actors o actress are from the 2'nd groop.