All genre writing is pulp in my eyes. It is throwaway, it has little significance other than entertainment. It has the same cultural weight as a visit to a water park or a fun-fair.
That does not mean it is bad, or even badly written. It serves a purpose and serves that purpose well. But we should not kid ourselves that it is much more than entertainment, or that it will ever be remembered by anybody but the fanboys and girls. Good, bad, it doesn't really matter when it comes to genre. You can write dozens of books that are essentially the same story (Koontz, King), or you can write thousands with the prose finesse of a microwave oven (Asimov), as long as it's entertaining you'll get a pass. Of course, if you wish to do more , genre and commercial fiction really aren't the places to do so.
I'll give you a case in point; Laurel K. Hamilton, arguably the single worst writer in the history of fiction (barring Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer). She continues to pump out absolute, god-awful, scraping the bottom of the barrel pseudo-bestial-gothic-porn but she's a best-seller. Her one duty is to entertain and she does that with aplomb. People still buy her dreck, and they still enjoy that dreck. She is successful. This then, is the only measure we have in genre - sales figures. There is no good or bad, no light and dark, no Luke and Vader. It's McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut, not an expensive meal at a five star French restaurant.
As to money, well, if you can write any story you want now without thinking about price, why write stories that are in genre? Why write what has essentially been written time and again if money and markets aren't the driving force? You might say it's because you enjoy the genre, but the genres we've all been raised on are diluted forms of original ideas by original creators. Shadow puppet-shows of the shadows cast by the original puppeteers. Genre is a set of expectations and tropes influenced, at least in part if not fully, by the marketing departments of publishers to increase sales. Step outside of that system and any writer, even Dan Brown (well maybe not that git) as a chance of writing something meaningful and lasting. Within the circle all you can ever do is add the proverbial digital clock to the already existing product (and maybe that's all people want in the end. Something that blinks. Ol' Familiar.)
Saying all this, I now don't give a tinker's cuss about writing or what it means any more. It's all product in a product-orientated world. It's Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Heinz Baked Beans. It's Subway Sandwiches and HP Sauce. We're never going to see the likes of another Steinbeck or Harold Pinter, nobody is going to discover another drawer full of Emily Dickinson or see the beard of a Ginsberg grow. As an art form, as an enrichment of culture, fiction is pretty much dead in the water now (as is most of our mass culture), so there's no need to worry about good or bad, better or worse. Stick some explosions in there, make the chapters short, no difficult words to confuse the under fifteens (or the YA's as the soulless marketers want us to think of them), don't mention religion, politics, or anything even remotely important, not even metaphorically, be sure that you have a bad guy who gets his comeuppance in the end and you're golden.
