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between good/effective in music and good/effective in other forms of art (I'm thinking particularly of books here, but perhaps also movies)
In fiction, I think you have to add a third "grade," something like:
Trendy (Not good, not effective)
So you wind up having something like "serious literature," "effective (i.e. fun to read) fiction," and "trendy bestsellers"
The third category is usually pretty easy to identify by its obviously short halflife and its *immediate* spawn of bad imitations, attempts to turn the trend into a mini-industry or genre: think Fifty Shades of Grey, which, despite its popularity, was actually quite uneffective as a story (way too long, very little plot). This showed in the terrible, terrible attempts to write two immediate sequels.
The problem is that really good "effective" fiction starts to look a lot like "serious" literature. Problem to some anyway. At some point the smart readers realize they should be reading what they like anyway, regardless of whether it's Harry Potter (effective fiction) or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (certainly thinks of itself as serious literature, and to the extent that I'd accept the category, I'd probably agree).
Not sure what my initial point was, lol, other than to say that attempting to parse good/effective might be a bit of a fool's errand, esp. considering that both terms are always already subjective and relatively arbitrary
-thebigfunk
~ i could still snort you under the table ~
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