News Flash–Southern Appalachia is Hot Fictional Territory!

Who woul­da guessed?  This is from Bri­an Cook at Book Pub­lish­ing News. I wish I knew the orig­i­nal source.

"Books based on life in small town south­ern Appalachia sell like hot­cakes!" stat­ed one publicist.

Accord­ing to book sales data, from 1998-present, Amer­i­ca can't get enough sto­ries about small town life in South­ern Appalachia. Over twen­ty-five mil­lion books about life in the Appalachi­an moun­tain regions of Amer­i­ca have been sold in the last decade alone. "That's an incred­i­ble sta­tis­tic," said one indus­try spokesman, "I don't know of anoth­er region of the coun­try that can tout such sales figures."

Inter­est­ing­ly, this phe­nom­e­non isn't a recent devel­op­ment. For many years, life in South­ern Appalachia has been a favorite des­ti­na­tion for read­ers of all ages.

Read on.

It's strange. I have Google alerts set up for var­i­ous strange and not-so-strange search strings–one for 'Appalachia' alone– and this arti­cle wasn't list­ed among my dai­ly arti­cles, and there's no back-link­ing. So, be hap­py or inter­est­ed, yes, but don't believe it until you see a pri­ma­ry source.

New fic­tion from Ray Nor­swor­thy com­ing this after­noon or tonight.