Do the chicks have to be young?

Maybe the 30-something sells more, but I agree with you. I'm going to work on a 40-something MC. And she's far from perfect. ;)

I don't think she has to be young at all. With the chick lit genre becoming so popular, I think that it's also broadening the character demographics, as well. More and more people of varying ages are reading chick lit (myself included - I just discovered it recently, and I'm 36) and consequently, IMO, I would think the market is widening.

.:Heather:.
Not all who wander are lost.
[img]http://nowrists.com/n7.cfm/207144/Blue/NoNovelTitle/n.png[/img]

Don't forget "Hen Lit"...for the older chick. :)

"Hen Lit" is exactly what I'd class it as... which is just another branch of "Chick Lit" only with older women... and they all fit under the big general umbrella of Romance.

Hi, I translate chick lit for a living, and these days I keep hearing about chicklet lit, hen lit, mum lit, dad lit, lad lit, crime lit and spook lit (chick lit with supernatural or ghostly goings on) - I think you could safely use any MC and just about any story about coming of any age, just as long as you keep the sort of confidantey, I-can-relate-to-her tone and could-happen-to-me story (as well as joined-by-hyphens-expressions, LOL).

Chick lit has really outgrown its box, it is humour, romance, comedy of errors and manners, warmth, seriousness, happy and satisfying endings, anything a good entertaining story should have. My NaNo story probably should be in the chick lit genre, but I put it in mainstream as I don't know whether my own voice will rebel and go for something else or use what it has learnt from translating chick lit.

If it does go for the chick lit, my characters are 25, 30, 49 and 62 years old - I might have to do more research into (read: drink more coffee with) more women's lives at different ages ... any help appreciated!

All the best

Shirley Valentine is classic mature Chick-Lit. There ought to be more of it!

you mentioned crime lit, I am doing a kind of mid to late 20's/early 30's characters, main is early thirties and it has chick lit ideas but also a murder mystery involved, would you say it could still be chick lit?

Why not? The tone and writing style could be the same around the actual crime bit, and anyway, chick lit is no longer confined to bubbly, play-on-words comedy and easy plot solutions. If it has a crime story in it, it is a crime fiction novel, but it can also be chick lit, if all the other criteria fit. Jennifer Weiner is one of my favourite - and one of the best selling - chick lit authors, and her book 'Goodnight, Nobody' is an attempt at mum crime lit, if you will ... Not everybody thought it worked, so for a bit of pitfall analysis you could look up some of the reviews on it on amazon and see what people said about it.

I think chick lit as a label is on its way out - it's really just a term for many different kinds of womens' mainstream fiction, but they like to make out it's so easy to read, so effortless, just to sell more books. In my humble opinion.

Just write the book you want to write, murders, motherhood, mayhem and all, and worry about the labels and marketing later. And stay in this forum - I think this is going to be one of the most fun places to be once the bell goes!

There are lots of cross-genre books - for crime, read Lean Mean Thirteen, the latest in Janet Evanovich's series about a ditsy New Jersey skip tracer (which includes the tec's grandma's latest romance). Very funny, great fun.