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This week's Write Space by Lee Murray.

I have the Great New Zealand Chick-lit Novel mouldering in a drawer at home. One publisher who returned it said it was ‘well-written, a great read, but too New Zealand in theme.'

Apparently, Kiwis don't want to read local writers. Indeed, according to Nielsen's overview of Bookscan results for 2010, local titles account for just four per cent of all fiction sold here.

Take out the highbrow writing, Kate de Goldi and Lloyd Jones and the like, and the statistics for New Zealand chick-lit are forcibly paltry. And confusing! After all, we're happy to read chick-lit from Ireland (Marian Keyes, Cecilia Aherne), England (Helen Fielding, Jane Green), Australia (Monica McInerney, Maggie Alderson) or the United States (Meg Cabot, Jennifer Crusie), and anything written by anyone if it's set in France or Italy. So why not New Zealand?

Why couldn't we see a romantic seaside story set in picturesque Omokoroa, or a tale of break-up and revenge in rural Te Puke?

Nikki Pellegrino, the UK-born but now New Zealand-based novelist and Sunday Star columnist, recently released The Villa Girls. With that title we might expect a story about two feisty sisters each with an eye on the sexy neighbour while they refurbish a dilapidated Wellington villa. Not even close. Pellegrino's tale is set in Italy, as were her four previous successful novels. Home-grown writer of eight books, Sarah-Kate Lynch has sold more than 50,000 units worldwide. One of her novels will undoubtedly have a kiwi theme. I take a look. France, France, England. Yes! Finding Tom Connor does start out promisingly in New Zealand, but sadly the heart-broken heroine runs away to Ireland in the early chapters. Lynch's latest offering could be a west coast charmer, but given its title: Dolce di Love, it's doubtful. Even our own chick-lit queens avoid New Zealand themes.

Maybe the problem is with the term ‘chick lit'. Written by women for women, chick-lit novels and their writers have been widely disparaged by critics as fluffy, inconsequential and of no literary merit. But writer Margo Candela predicts a come-back: 'When the Sex and the City movie came out in 2008 I had high hopes we could start calling chick lit chick lit again. The movie's box office worldwide gross of $400 million made it obvious that women are not only interested in stories about other women having complicated and funny lives, but they're willing to put their considerable buying power behind it. Trends come and go, but a genre is much harder to kill even if some people try to ignore it to death.” (Writer Unboxed, 7 Sept, 2010). Margo has a point.

So rather than ignore my novel to death, perhaps I'll dust it off and give it another go.

Lee Murray's children's story Battle of the Birds will be launched on Saturday, 17 September, 10am at Papamoa Library. Includes readings and a free paper-folding workshop for kids. All welcome. www.battleofthebirds.info