A word of advice to the men out there: should you ever wish to get noticed, literally and painfully, try reading a Carmen Reid novel while sitting on a train.

The novel need not necessarily have been written by Reid, of course; it could be by Jenny Colgan, Wendy Holden, Marian Keyes or any of the other main players in the genre that introduced itself more than a decade ago as chick lit. These are books that can be judged by their covers because their covers are typically frothy, colourful things with flamboyant calligraphic typefaces and punning titles featuring girls’ names.

The cover of Reid’s latest novel (her sixth), Late Night Shopping, features a pink handbag, just to put the matter beyond doubt: “Sometimes readers tell me they’ve forced their husbands to read the books,” says Reid, “but

I’m fairly resigned to the readership being exclusively female. It’s a girls-only club.”

Whatever the genre’s literary merits, there’s no denying it has identified its market with a ruthless and unparalleled exclusivity — the market being aspirational young women, or women who aspire to being aspirational young women. It helps if their lives have been marbled by touches of romantic trauma, if they know how it feels to wait alone in a cinema queue anxiously checking their watch; it also helps if motherhood exists for them as one of life’s unknown mysteries.

More than anything else, it helps if the reader does not understand the offside rule. This is literature that never even lifts up the loo seat. Some women find it unputdownable; all men find it unpickupable. Hence the flutter of looks and double-takes sustained by any man reading Late Night Shopping on the 11am to Waverley. You feel slightly more obtrusive than a nun reading the latest Sven Hassel. To quote Raymond Chandler, the great purveyor of private dick lit, you’re as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

We currently find ourselves deep in prime chick-lit season; chick-lit novels are at their most profuse when there isn’t an R in the month and the nation’s unattached fillies are making for Mediterranean beaches (it’s for this reason that you rarely see a chick-lit novel in hardback).

Since her debut, Three in a Bed, in 2002, Reid has established herself as one of the genre’s bigger hitters, her five previous novels achieving an average 100,000 sales in the UK alone. You will have seen the posters in train stations, though whether you registered them is another question, such is the interchangeability of the visual side of chick lit, with its cartoon heroines tottering on stiletto heels, often trailing Louis Vuitton luggage.

Her novels have the slogan “a fabulous read, a sexy read, a Carmen Reid”. Fabulous, in this context, translates as a persistent and consuming fascination with label names, sunny holidays and all the treats modern women demand simply because they’re worth it, like champagne on a saline drip and mortgage-requiring handbags and gladrags — Alexander McQueen and Pucci are mentioned on page one; Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, Miu Miu and Missoni join them by page two.

The sex, meanwhile, is taken care of by sweet, reliable, handsome Ed, boyfriend of the novel’s heroine, Annie Valentine, who is setting out to establish a high-fashion outlet on eBay. “Ed let his jeans fall to the floor, but he wasn’t in a hurry. The fact that he was never in a hurry was the single most sexy thing about him.”

Ed, however, is soon to be usurped, potentially, by Mr B, a Latin lothario with a handbag factory: “He settled in comfortably beside her in the bright red Maserati. When he fired the engine up , he revved on the accelerator and there was a throaty vroom of power.”

It’s one of the generic conventions of chick lit that gentle, meaningful sex — and a tiny modicum of rough, meaningless sex — appear at regular intervals between visits to bikini-waxers and cuticle-enhancers.