We had an interesting email message earlier this week from a very smart woman by the name of Claude Nougat (she’s an author, a painter, a economist and a blogger, and that’s her photo at the right), and I’m sure enough that she is on to something that I wanted to share some of her thoughts with you, our Kindle Nation readers.
It’s a straightforward idea: basically that it is time to create a new category of books that are likely to appeal to Baby Boomers, a term that generally refers to people born between 1946 and 1964. Here’s the basic pitch that she made when she started a GoodReads group on the subject:
When baby boomers reached their teens in the 1950s/1960s, the YA novel was born as a genre, dealing with coming-of-age issues. Now that baby boomers are 55+ and embarking on their second life, most of them in excellent health thanks to medical advances, it is time for writers to come up with Baby Boomer novels, or BB novels.
A BB novel deals with “coming-of-old-age issues”, and just like YA novels, it can be tragic, romantic, suspenseful, humorous, ironical but always compassionate.
Personally I suspect the category could be defined somewhat more broadly, without losing its appeal, to overlaps not only with various fiction genres but also with several nonfiction categories including biography and memoir, personal finance, and — dare I say it? — self-help.
As the BoomerCafe website noted in introducing an article by Ms. Nougat on the subject the other day, “baby boomers are the biggest, richest demographic in the world today.”
And just as important, for us here at KND, is the fact that boomers are the largest single “demographic” among our readers.
Naturally, few of us are interested in reading only the books that would make it onto a Boomer Books list. But it might be nice to have such listings at hand when we were looking for our next great read.
What do you think?
And what books would you like to see included? Please feel free to share your ideas in the comment area under our Coming Soon? Books for Boomers – A Brand New Genre or Category for Kindle Readers! post, and thanks!
We’ll see how much interest there is and see if we can help Claude Nougat take this idea to the next level.
And by the way, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention that part of what got her thinking about all this in the first place is that she recently published a boomer book of her own: the novel A Hook in the Sky, which is currently available on Kindle for the very attractive promotional price of just 99 cents.
Maybe you’ll check it out. And maybe in the process we’ll all discover a new category of books we enjoy!