Thanks, AnneB, for posting the link.
Rinaldi's article struck me as more wry and rueful than bitter--and, okay, a little sad, too. (It has the same tone as her back-cover warning, so perhaps that warning is also her own little joke.) It certainly makes me sad to imagine that with 39 books to her credit, Rinaldi might not be feeling much love from her editors, or the chain booksellers, or the powers that decide which books get displayed face-out on the shelves.
It makes me sad that I love a genre that doesn't produce many new titles that don't incorporate elements of another, more popular genre (retold fairy tales, pirates, fantasy, horror, mystery, or Jane Austen). (I never dreamed I'd have my fill of homages to Jane Austen.)
But for me the heart of Rinaldi's essay wasn't the sadness or rue. It was this: there are readers who love and even need straight historical fiction. Maybe they're not in the millions, but they're in the thousands, and perhaps the tens of thousands. They would read a book a week, or more--if they could find them.
I have a daydream: a 21st century version of the "little" presses, on the Web. A web publisher could specialize in a "little" genre. Overhead is low because each copy of a book is printed only on demand, when it's ordered. The "little" genres would find their readers via blogs, Twitter, and short video sites. And -- important! -- writers would compete on a smaller, specialized playing field. Readers wouldn't be deprived of Rinaldi because her sales are unlikely to match Bray's or Godberson's.
If the experiment doesn't work, for one title or for the whole shebang, the loss is not as huge, because on-demand printing means no warehouses full of unsold books. But if it worked?
So--where's the editor out there who would like to be the 21st century's Alfred Knopf?