Spike Magazine quotes Susie Bright's interview in Publishers' Weekly:

"Do you know how many times I've walked into a book-signing and the manager greets me with: "Thank god you're here!—the only thing we're selling nowadays are sex and business books."

My heart sinks. It may sound good for "sex authors" at first glance, but it's more like an "end times" mantra. It's the last thing the bookseller says before they close their doors.

We are in a bookshop crisis of mind-boggling proportions. I have a list of every bookstore that I have appeared at or done a special promotion for since 1984.

Do you know how many of those stores have closed since I started my list?

NINETY PERCENT.

Book biz observers understand this, but they don't always draw the line between our business imploding and the slender survival thread of erotica."

Put that in the context of this comment from Conversational Reading about the ongoing debate around The Quill Awards:

<b>"Can we just get a blogosphere-wide denounciation of this Quills idiocy? ...They´re just gluing together some shoddy piece of garbage so that they have yet another marketing tool. That´s all this sham is."</b>

Since when did marketing books become a bad idea? Most of the books on the Quills awards are not business books or erotica. So if companies want to put marketing dollars behind exposing those books to more readers, well...then why not?

The Kenyon Review (which Conversational Reading cites) makes a more pointed argument. The problem with the Quill Awards is not that they are a marketing tool, but that they are a BAD one.