Writer Sanctum
Writer's Haven => Quill and Feather Pub [Public] => Topic started by: German Translator on December 23, 2018, 03:41:19 AM
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https://slate.com/culture/2018/12/best-sellers-books-profanity.html
Why Are There So Many F**king Best-sellers Right Now With F**k in the Title?
Perusing the best-seller list these days is an adults-only experience. The top 25 books on Amazon’s list as of this writing include cookbooks titled What the F*@#k Should I Make for Dinner? and 50 Ways to Eat c*ck, as well as a self-help guide called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Two others are adult coloring books—it’s a whole thing—titled Calm the F*ck Down and Go F*ck Yourself, I’m Coloring. What the f*ck is going on?
When the children’s-book parody Go the F**k to Sleep became a best-seller back in 2011, its title received thrilled news coverage before it even hit stores. But now, once-titillating indecency is commonplace. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that profane titles were “flooding bookstores,” and causing dilemmas for booksellers and marketers. And there’s plenty more obscenity in store for 2019, including The F*ck It Diet and I Used To Be a Miserable F*ck: An Everyman’s Guide to a Meaningful Life.
Cursing is inherently a bit aggro; it’s meant to shock. But many of these titles play with the juxtaposition of femininity and profanity. There are cookbooks (Thug Kitchen: Eat Like You Give a F*ck), craft books (Subversive Cross Stitch: 50 F*cking Clever Designs for Your Sassy Side), self-help guides (F*ck Feelings; Unf*ck Your Brain), celebrity memoir (Kelly Osbourne’s There Is No F*cking Secret: Letters from a Badass Bitch), journals (Zen as F*ck), “gratitude journals” (f*ck This sh*t Show), etiquette guides (Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck) and planners (Another f*cking sh*t List). Coloring books are an industry all to themselves, with titles like f*ck That sh*t, Eat a Bag of Dicks, and—going all in—F*ckity F*ck F*ck F*ck. If you don’t just like reading, but like to advertise that you like reading, there are passels of tchotchkes emblazoned with the slogan “f*ck off, I’m reading.”
“I think my audience are the people who think they don’t like or need ‘self-help,’ ” said Sarah Knight, the author of a series of profanely titled books. “They come for the swear-y titles and stay for the no-bullsh*t content.” Knight worked as an editor at several major publishing houses in New York before quitting and writing The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck, whose title tweaked Marie Kondo’s blockbuster ode to domestic minimalism. The send-up became a sensation of its own. The fourth book in Knight’s No F*cks Given series, Calm the F*ck Down, will be published later this month.
Part of what’s driving this trend might be that foul-mouthed book titles tend to fare better in online retailers than they do in bookstores. Titles like Knight’s can pose problems for brick-and-mortar bookstores, which are presumed to be family-friendly spaces. The Wall Street Journal recently quoted one bookseller who took care to position vulgar titles away from the children’s section, and another who kept Go the F**k to Sleep behind the counter. They’re similarly tricky for newspapers with conservative style guides. On the New York Times best-seller list for advice and how-to books, where The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck has spent 105 weeks, the title is represented as The Subtle Art of Not Giving a —————.
Knight said that many booksellers will not stock and display her books without that fig leaf of an asterisk, which almost all these titles employ. Her titles vary slightly in different markets for this reason, with the United States on the more liberal end, requiring only a single star. In the United Kingdom, it’s “F**k,” and a large book-seller in Australia requested a special “F***” cover years after the book became a hit. In the United States, airports and Urban Outfitters were among the toughest markets to crack with her first risqúe title. Knight also said Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter will not let her advertise with either photos or captions that display her book titles. “I went through the rigmarole of setting up ‘No f*cks Given’ accounts all over social media only to be negged every time I tried to pay for ads,” she said. “They won’t even take my f*cking money!”
Despite the occasional marketing hurdle, however, clearly these books are selling just fine. That’s the surprising thing about all of these supposedly irreverent titles. The premise of their humor is that they’re shocking, but they’re now so prevalent that it’s hard to imagine being shocked by them. They are “the product of a culture in which transgressing social norms has become an agreed-on social norm,” as essayist Dan Brooks wrote of the “naughty” card game Cards Against Humanity a few years ago. That game has been so successful that G-rated board games like Taboo and Cranium now tout “dark” or “adult” versions for people who enjoy dirty jokes, but can’t conjure them unless they’re printed on a deck of glossy cards. Profanity is now utterly basic.
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Just one more reason digital is expanding while brick-and-mortar is struggling--the ability to buy naughty things without anyone judging you. Like ordering sex toys or explicit materials online rather than physically going to an "adult" sex shop.
I think it's a phase, though, a cycle of vulgarity. It will pass, or become passe. As everyone tries to stand out, nobody will stand out. It's kind of like when Hooters (the restaurant) burst on the scene and spawned imitators. For a while it was the hottest thing going. Now, it's a mere niche as the novelty of being served by scantily clad women wore off and society moved away from seeing that kind of thing as mainstream.
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Because people are in the mind set that F*ck is descriptive of their mood lately. Or they are finally letting their inner freak fly and enjoying previous things held back from them. FREEBIRD! :banana:
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Writers thinking they're being edgy. To me it just shows a lack of talent.
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The first person who did it WAS probably being edgy and original. Every successive author was just being a copycat.
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I would say that it is as likely to be art mimicking real life more closely. It might not be something everyone or anyone likes but that particular word is so widely used nowadays, that it has all but lost it's shock value. It's also a word that has been around for hundreds of years, according to Merriam Webster since the 14th century but likely to have been in use since well before then in colloquial language, so there is little original about it's use.
Personally, it doesn't bother me. I see it so often in my editing that it is just letters on a page now, pretty much like most swearwords and it wouldn't stop me buying a book with it in the title.
Like most fads, it may well pass off fairly quickly, although titling your book with 'The Girl ...' seems to still be going strong:)
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Hmmm maybe I should change the title of my non-fiction book :icon_think:
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Personally, it doesn't bother me. I see it so often in my editing that it is just letters on a page now, pretty much like most swearwords and it wouldn't stop me buying a book with it in the title.
In my newest book, which should be out before the end of the year, I had inserted my very first "f-bomb" ever. I left it there through the first and second round of editing, because it really did fit in the situation. It didn't make it past the third edit though because I reworded the sentence and found a better way to express the dialogue. So, six novels in and I have yet to drop an f-bomb on my readers. When the day comes that I do, I'm sure it will be a shock to my readers.
Oh, and I did use a couple of sh-bombs in this newest novel. Maybe I'm just working up to it slowly. :icon_rolleyes:
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I don't mind swearing and there are f-words, s-words and others in my books.
However, in this case the use of the f-word in the titles of random books really does seem to be an attempt to make otherwise regular cookbooks, craft books, fitness books seem edgy. Which is a bit silly, especially since you could substitute or eliminate the f-word in most of them. I guess the origin is this "Go the f-word to sleep" picture book of a few year's ago. Which I've never liked, because guess what? If you have kids, they don't always sleep when you want them to.
Coincidentally, one place where I permanently removed an f-word was in the title of a still unpublished novel, which I changed from F-buddies to Friends with Benefits. Same meaning, but much less potential hassle and I still get to use the alternate term in the novel itself. Come to think of it, I should really finish that one. It was very different from everything else I write, but good.
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Because why the f*ck not?