Haven’t I seen this book somewhere before?

Falling is a ghost story that doesn’t have any physic powers or spirit mediums. It’s not set in a creaky, dark old country house or European castle in the 1890s or a foggy graveyard in the middle of the freezing cold night.

It’s set 20 years in the future, in the middle of a busy modern city, during a blisteringly hot summer, much of it taking place in bright sunlit weather.

What I’m hoping is that it’s something you’ve never seen before.

Unfortunately, from everything I’ve seen in my day job as a books and publishing journalist, something we’ve never seen before is the last thing the book industry wants (much like the movie industry).

We’re in an era where I think* they should be branching out, taking big swings and big risks. The book industry is coming back from the economic ravages of the COVID pandemic, but it’s still a shadow of its former self and in an age where viral videos, 4K video games and streaming services are capitalising more of our attention (and marketing themselves better), and it’s not going to recover any of its former glory if it keeps doing business as usual.

But even still, every time I see the upcoming release schedules of the major publishers, my eyes glaze over. There are always one or two standouts where I don’t immediately know the exact genre, aesthetic and trend they’re following and that’s not to say they’re necessarily interesting, but at least they’re different.

What isn’t different is the way every release cycle includes a series of stock standard ideas, tropes and genres that are recycled so often they’ve just grown dreary.

I can imagine the marketing directors at every commercial publisher in the country having an unchangeable mandate engraved in a plaque on a wall overlooking the marketing department about how every month’s releases must include;

• A romance novel set in (and partly about) the Australian outback.
• A World War Two novel set in a sumptuous, romantic city in Europe (preferably Paris) about a very classy woman who’s either a spy or embroiled in some intrigue involving the Nazis.
• A (usually ghostwritten) memoir of a notable AFL or cricket player.
• A thriller about a damaged big city cop returning to his/her small town rural home where their presence pokes a hornet’s nest about a childhood tragedy they were involved in.
• A novel about a small group of either female friends or a family whose long-buried secrets threaten to tear them apart. Bonus points if it has the point of view of two characters decades apart told in parallel.
• A sparkly, New York style chick lit rom-com where the heroine either works or wants to work in magazines, the cover of which will be a highly stylised illustration of a very well dressed young woman.

* I’m not impartial and, therefore, my opinions are little better than worthless. After all, they publish all those books and not mine, so of course I think the system is all wrong.