Millstones

Margaret Drabble claims that her publishers, Penguin, are trying to persuade her to dumb her work down and increase sales. She spoke to the Independent:

"I do feel publishers are under very strong pressure to sell books rather than encourage long-term readers. They have not asked me to dumb down ... but I have a feeling there's a problem. I write literary novels but I can sense my publishers have difficulty in selling me as a genre ... whether in literary fiction, or women's fiction or shopping fiction. They don't quite know whether I'm highbrow or literary," she said.

Penguin were 'unavailable for comment.' You can read more about it here.