EnWords News Roundup (11-24-2008)

A collection of news about words in their various forms.

• Free Recipes as Cookbook Sales Mechanism Will Schwalbe, former EIC at Hyperion, has started a food site called Cookstr that gives away recipes from top-name and lesser-known but solid cookbook authors as a way to get people to buy copies. (NYT)


• Random House to Digitize Books Random House will make thousands of additional titles available in e-book form.(AP)


• Writing the Unwritable in the U.K. Britain has much stricter (or looser, depending on your viewpoint) libel laws than in the US, as well as other impediments to freely publishing information. But journalists have developed all sorts of ways to report on that which could get them in legal hot water. (NYT)


• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Stops Buying - For Now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has told its editors that it has “temporarily stopped acquiring manuscripts” in trade and reference. They can't say when the ban will end. Although claiming that the move is about "doing things smarter" than "the end of literature," note that not buying now means not having a selection of new titles in 12 to 18 months. Either the house has a massive backlog, or things are worse than management wants to admit. (Publishers Weekly)


• Obama and New Book Directions A Guardian blogger suggests that Obama's election will open the book industry to many new types of titles as well as creating a market for some backlist entries. (Guardian)


• US Branch of Manga Publisher to Close The U.S. branch of Broccoli International, a Japan-based manga, anime, game, and merchandise publisher, will close. Although probably few readers of this blog are interested in manga and anime, it's something to note. Graphic novels have become mainstream business and the same approach to story telling has been moving into the non-fiction world. This might be a very early indicator of changing tastes of younger generations. (PW)


• EU Book Digitization Project The European Union has launched Europeana, a plan to scan and make available online "millions of books, artworks, manuscripts, maps, objects and films from the most important libraries, museums and archives, and provide them free to download from one website." It will also include video and audio of interest. Having paid attention to the suit against Google, the EU is focusing on works in the public domain. The site is currently down because there was such overwhelming interest that the traffic crashed the servers. (Guardian)

Winner of Oddest Book Title in 30 Years Announced

I mentioned that the time had come to vote for what you thought was the oddest book title through the Bookseller. The ballots are now in and counted and the winner is ... Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers.

Vampire Novelist's Reputation at Stake

Stephanie Meyer had managed to write the extremely popular Twilight series and developed a legion of fans. Now that is coming back to bite her a little lower than the neck. The last book was apparently so poorly written that Entertainment Weekly gave it a D rating and many fans of the series are now talking about setting fire to it. That makes me wonder two things. First, could there have been some extremely heavy editing or even ghosting (thematically appropriate, at least) on the earlier books? Not that it's impossible for an author to have an off volume, but when it goes that far south, you have to ask.

Secondly, fame is clearly a double-edged sword. Who's going to buy the next book?

Time to Vote for the Oddest Book Title of the Last 30 Years

The Bookseller magazine hosts an annual competition, called the Diagram Prize, for the world's oddest book title. (The 2006 winner was The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification.) Because the prize was started 30 years ago by Diagram Group founder Bruce Robertson when bored at a Frankfurt Book Fair, everyone involved decided to have a recognition of the long-lasting nature of oddity. Now you can cast your vote. Pick your choice from all past winning titles. I'm wavering between The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today and People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It.

Getting Quotations Right

I find it intriguing to hear stories about misattributions of quotes, particularly when the words become associated with the supposed speaker. The New York Times recently had an article by the Yale Book of Quotations. A number of the examples are surprising:

For example, we all think we know that Harry Truman originated “The buck stops here.” But we are all mistaken. Truman did receive a “gadget” displaying these four words made at the Federal Reformatory at El Reno, Okla., mailed to him in 1945 and then displayed by him on his desk. A search of electronic newspaper databases, however, pulls up The Reno Evening Gazette of Oct. 1, 1942, with a photograph of a sign clearly reading “The Buck Stops Here” on the desk of Army Col. A. B. Warfield.

I never would have guessed that "all politics are local" could be attributed to a 1932 article in a Maryland newspaper rather than Tip O'Neill.

Review: The Sociopath Next Door

The concept of the book is disturbing: four percent of all people in the United States are sociopaths, meaning people who literally have no conscience and who are capable of doing anything to anyone in pursuit of what they want without regret, remorse, or even the slightest twinge of guilt. I've known people like this, you've known people like this, and it's heartening to know that you're not crazy and that people actually do act outside all mores and morals. At least you aren't dreaming it. Given that the author is a psychiatrist who supposedly taught at the Harvard Medical School for 25 years (I'm not doubting her, just noting that I haven't independently checked.), she would have the intellectual and practical background to address the subject.

From that end, I think the book is important, but I found that some of the writing itself was disappointing. For example, there are somewhat stiff phrases of quasi-academic or medical jargon that she uses repeatedly and that stick out like a sore thumb. That may be fine in a technical paper, but is stylistically out of place in a book aimed at the popular market. Also, I noticed that the author would tend to make assumptions in her explanations that didn't necessarily have enough logical basis. For example, the lack of conscience itself would not seem to be a motive for the driving need to play oneupsmanship with others. That may be a common characteristic, but it would seem to be from some other dynamic. (This is from knowing some people who would seem to be textbook sociopaths who saved their activities for going after what they wanted at the expense of all others. Crushing someone just for the sake of doing so would have been a distraction to them.) But overall, it's worth reading to at least raise the question of exactly who lives next door - or is in the next room, office, or chair.

Getting a Book Recommendation

There are a number of sites that recommend music or videos, based on what you already like. Apparently someone has been trying the same with books. He had been pursuing a number of potential business partners for a year, but now apparently there is a real contract with a real client that will provide "a great deal of potential data to work with," rather than the 207 mostly science fiction novels that have driven the research. I wonder if everyone will be told to try Dune?

The Thoughtful Side of Cassanova

The Guardian has an article on a new biography of Cassanova. Some newly reopened archives in Prague are providing food for literal thought. Aside from Cassanova's legendary amorous adventures (which included a few men as well as women, supposedly), he was an otherwise busy man:

In addition to the vast History of My Life, he wrote a total of 42 books and plays, including a translation of the Iliad, a five-volume science-fiction novel, mathematical treatises and opera libretti. He was also a committed follower of the Kabbalah, the mystical Jewish cult holding a deep fascination for him to the extent that he attributed his life's successes to its power.

Print While You Wait: Bookstores and Print-On-Demand

Blackwell's, a so-called high-street bookseller in London, will be installing book printing machines throughout its 60 stores in the UK, according to the Guardian. The current speed is 40 pages per minute, but a new model expected later this year should double the speed. Imagine wanting any of a million books and waiting 7 to 10 minutes to get what you want. It sure beats express shipping.

How Many Libraries Is Your Author In?

Someone on a writers' board pointed out this resource: a site that purports to tell you in how many libraries you can find the work of a given author. I have no idea how accurate this is, but it's amusing, none the less.

New Author Signing Record

Ken Follett, a British writer who is apparently popular in Spain, set a new world's record for an author signing copies of a book at a single sitting, knocking off 2,050 in three-and-a-half hours at Madrid's book fair, according to an AFP story. The old record of 1,600 ... was also held by Follett.

Life for Kenyan Writers

I came across this article about ecnomic reality for a Kenyan writer, and pass it on. Interestingly, except for the value of the currency and the extreme book piracy, it doesn't seem all that different from what I've seen in the US.

Profitable Day for Rancid Rhyming

An auction showed that bad poetry can financially top popular contemporary fiction. While a rare set of Harry Potter books insribed by the author went for $12,000, a collection of 35 self-published poems by William Topaz McGonagall, who has the reputation of being the worst poet in the English language, sold for $15,600, according to this story by the Associated Press.

Book Launch 2.0

This post's title is actually the title of a Youtube video by author Dennis Cass about the pain of an author trying to promote a book in a Web 2.0 world. It's very funny in a low-key way, and I'm tempted to buy his book as a show of support. Actually, if I were really with it online, I'd probably find a way to download the book for free, helping to make all his marketing work for naught. No wonder writers drink.

Romance Writer Loses Publisher Over Plagiarism

According to the Associated Press, Signet Books will no longer publish popular romance writer Cassie Edwards. It seems that Ms. Edwards had repeatedly taken descriptions, sentences, and sections from reference books and magazines without any form of attribution. The problem was first found by a romance lit blog with the great name Smart Bitches Love Trashy Books. Congratulations to them for unearthing the literary theft, and I'm shaking my head at either AP or the Boston Globe, which replaced Bitches with B------. J--z.

200,000 Computer Generated Books

The New York Times has an article about Philip M. Parker, a management professor who uses computers and programmers to cull information from the web and turn it into books. He's created - I don't want to use the word "write" - 200,000 of them that he sells through Amazon.com:

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

I've heard of the sausage factory approach before, but this is one high volume production line. The idea of having boilerplate language with specifics filled in to create a "new" document isn't new. But I wonder how much of the added content is really free of copyright restraints and available for legal use.

Publisher Brings Down the House of Cards

The blog Gawker has an interesting post about how Free Press and William Morrow have essentially been complicit in yet another fabricated memoir: Bringing Down the House, the story of a blackjack team trying to beat the house in Las Vegas, and the basis for the new movie 21. Their post is based on the Boston Globe Sunday magazine story, House of Cards:

Yet "Bringing Down the House" is not a work of "nonfiction" in any meaningful sense of the word. Instead of describing events as they happened, Mezrich appears to have worked more as a collage artist, drawing some facts from interviews, inventing certain others, and then recombining these into novel scenes that didn't happen and characters who never lived. The result is a crowd-pleasing story, eagerly marketed by his publishers as true - but which several of the students who participated say is embellished beyond recognition.

And publishers wonder how faked memoirs can come into being? Clearly this has gone beyond the publishers having insufficient resources to fact check and has entered the land of deliberately looking the other way:

Both Mezrich and the book's publisher, Simon and Schuster's Free Press, see nothing to apologize for. The book, they point out, was published with a disclaimer (in fine print, on the copyright page) warning that the names, locations, and other details had been changed, and that some events and individuals are composites, created from other events and individuals. Nearly all the details and facts in the book were culled from his research, Mezrich says, and where they were compressed or creatively rearranged, the fundamental truth of the story he tells is undiminished.

What the hell are they thinking? Supposedly there is only one actual, real character - Jeff Ma - who ended up doing things in the book that the real Ma had never heard of. There's a big problem any time one starts to urinate in the well that provides your water - not only in the practical implications, but in the very attitude that leads the person to do it. And that's exactly what the publisher, editor, and writer have done: urinated all over the industry, profession, and reading public.

Amazon.com Tries to Bully Publishers

Print-on-demand, or POD, has become an important technology in book publishing and will only become even more so. Instead of having to pay for a run of thousands of books, individuals and companies can have single copies turned out when needed. They are more expensive, but can be the difference between financial feasibility of a new book or non-existence.

But Amazon.com is trying to force publishers that use POD technology to get it from the reseller's own division. Don't buy from them, and they disable the Buy button on a book's listing. Here's a Publishers Weekly article, and one from a writers' weekly newsletter called, appropriately, Writers Weekly.

Think I'm going to reconsider from where I buy any of my books. Any reseller with this much of a stranglehold is too big for the good of us all.

Happy Belated Birthday, Douglas Adams

I meant to post this yesterday, but, ironically, was tied up with deadlines. How can you not celebrate the birth of a man who said, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

Check Wikipedia for a short biography of the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the name of which he apparently came up with while flat on his back, drunk in an Austrian field. Although many people are familiar with the book and movie, I think the ultimate form of the piece was the original BBC radio series, which was funny as all get out, although here's a tip of the hat to Alan Rickman's portrayal of Marvin, the miserable robot with a brain the size of a planet.

Memoirs and Faulty Memory

The New York Times has an article about yet another imaginary memoir. In this case, a woman writing under a pseudonym (Wouldn't that seem to be a giveaway in a memoir?) claimed to be a "half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods."

Apparently not. She was all white, grew up in a posh part of LA, never lived with a foster family, never did drugs, and never ran with gangs. The 33-year-old Margaret Seltzer admitted all when her sister, who saw a piece in the Times, dropped a dime:

“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

No, the details were taken from people she had met while supposedly working to reduce gang violence in LA. Yup, putting a voice to people is important, particularly when you're getting a significant advance to do so and, presumably, not sharing it.

Aren't there giveaways, other than wanting to use a pseudonym and then be willing to have your photograph taken? The writing seemed to telegraph to some critics that something was going on:

Writing in The Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the “humane and deeply affecting memoir,” but noted that some of the scenes “can feel self-consciously novelistic at times.” In Entertainment Weekly, Vanessa Juarez wrote that “readers may wonder if Jones embellishes the dialogue” but went on to extol the “powerful story of resilience and unconditional love.”

I know that book publishers are short-staffed - got to wring out every last penny for the corporate owners, after all - but, really, couldn't they invest in a fact checker to make even a cursory inquiry? Let's see: $30,000 to save many times that number and enough embarrassment to fill a small stadium. Seems like a smart investment to me.

Short List for Odd Book Titles

The Bookseller, a publishing trade magazine in the UK, has released its annual short list of odd book titles. Head to the publication's web site and take your pick of the following:

• I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen


• How to Write a How to Write Book


• Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues


• Cheese Problems Solved


• If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs


• People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood

The first title is from a novel, but the rest are nonfiction. And here are some of the titles that just missed this year's short list:

• Drawing and Painting the Undead


• Stafford Pageant: The Exciting Innovative Years 1901–1952


• Tiles of the Unexpected: A Study of Six Miles of Geometric Tile Patterns on the London Underground

But, really, how could Drawing and Painting the Undead miss? I detect an anti-zombie bias.

Grisham Has Healthy Attitude

I just read this AP piece about John Grisham. He apparently - correctly - views what he does as straight entertainment, not literature in the slightest:

"I'm not sure where that line goes between literature and popular fiction," the mega-selling author says. "I can assure you I don't take myself serious enough to think I'm writing literary fiction and stuff that's going to be remembered in 50 years. I'm not going to be here in 50 years; I don't care if I'm remembered or not. It's pure entertainment."

Now out with his 21st book, he's likely right, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Not all writing has to be high literature or something that will last the ages. But I'd hope, at least, that any writer would try to make what he or she did as polished and pleasing from the view of the craft as possible. If not, I can't imagine something that would be duller and more painful to undertake.

New York Times Reporter Claims NYT Book Review is Unfair

Sometimes you see the strangest things, like an employee of an organization vociferously attacking his own publication for offering an unfair and twisted review of his own book. Editor & Publisher, a trade magazine for the newspaper industry, has a story about David Clay Johnston, who says that an upcoming NYT review of his book Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves At Government Expense (And Stick You With The Bill) has a number of "egregious errors." Here's the letter that Johnston sent, and that is included in this article:

To the Editor:

Jonathan Chait's review of my book "Free Lunch" (Feb. 3) ignores its central thesis and neglects to disclose that he wrote a competing book.

He writes that I embrace litigiousness to solve societal problems. In fact, I describe litigation as "scary and nasty" and show ways to reduce lawsuits. My solution is for taxpayers to cover the full costs of Congress, ending legalized bribery.

Chait writes that I regard corporations as "inherently malevolent," which is ridiculous given that I am chairman of the board of a small corporation with big ambitions. He says I regard deregulation as "evil," when I wrote that deregulation is a fantasy and I show new regulations that thwart market capitalism, drive up prices and hinder competition. The only things I call "evil," citing the Bible, are policies that take from the many to give to the rich.

Chait twists words I use to describe the shared values of those Democrats and Republicans who favor people over corporations to make them appear as my views, not a description of theirs.

Chait misleadingly connects me to a faction of Democrats and calls me a left-wing populist, even though I am a registered Republican, a matter of public record that is posted all over the Internet, and without mentioning that classic conservative values drawn from Adam Smith, Andrew Mellon and the Bible are invoked throughout "Free Lunch."

"Free Lunch" is full of news, hard facts and plain English explanations of how market capitalism has been perverted. Chait did an excellent job of one thing -- hiding what "Free Lunch" actually says from readers of The New York Times Book Review.

David Cay Johnston

Ouch. E&P tried to reach Chait, who declined to talk.

Books That Make You Dumb

This is just too amusing not to share. Virgil Griffith is a computer science grad student at CalTech. He looked at the top 100 books that were popular at thousands of colleges, brought in the average SAT scores, and came up with an "average" SAT score for each of the books. The chart is at a site he created called Booksthatmakeyoudumb.

Carnegie Mellon's Online Books

Carnegie Mellon University has scanned more than 1.5 million books into a freely-available online service, according to the Associated Press. Over half the works are supposedly out of copyright or included with the permission of the coypright holders. (Makes me wonder about the other half.) Interestingly, it appears that 970,000 of the books are in Chinese, 360,000 in English, 50,000 in a language of southern India, and 40,000 in Arabic, which would seem to be an interesting statement on the demographics of the school. If you're interested in checking this out, click here.

Book By Committee

Consultant (I think) Barry Libert is one of the names on the book We are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business, but the number of contributors runs into the thousands. That's because Libert and his other named co-author Jon Spector used a wiki, inviting contributions from what eventually became 4,000 people, to cover how businesses can work with communities. However, the question is what a contribution actually is. In an interview, Libert said:

To be honest, we got more feedback about the book writing process and the tools we used, i.e. the wiki, than we did on the actual prose. We had over 250 blog posts about the project and some provided positive and negative feedback. Most were curious as to whether or not the project would succeed.

Hey, I said it was a book by committee. Sounds like most committees I've seen.

Anti-Spam Tool Used in Deciphering Digitized Texts

The BBC has a story about how researchers are using an anti-spam tool to help digitize old books that machines can't read. You've probably seen a captcha - one of those distorted images of text that you have to deciper and type into a box. Having users unscramble things is helping Carnegie Mellow University with its digitizing program. OCR (optical character recognition) is supposed to take scans of text and translate them into somethig you could edit in a word processor. But the age of these books can cause one mistake out of every ten words - a real pain for the scanning personnel to fix manually. But if you take each of those images, put them up in captchas, and have people from around the Internet take a few minutes and fix them, it goes a lot faster:

Thanks to the adoption of reCAPTCHAs by popular websites like Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon, the system is helping to decipher about one million words every day for CMU's book archiving project, according to [Luis von Ahn, a Professor at CMU].

Now, if only we had an equivalent system for deciphering the handwriting of doctors.

Celebrate Banned Book Week

It's well into the week, but never too late to read something other people don't want you to. Here's a link to the American Library Association site.

Big Brother is Reading Over Your Shoulder

According to Wired Magazine, the Department of Homeland Security is keeping wide ranging information on international travelers entering the country:

Privacy advocates obtained database records showing that the government routinely records the race of people pulled aside for extra screening as they enter the country, along with cursory answers given to U.S. border inspectors about their purpose in traveling. In one case, the records note Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore's choice of reading material, and worry over the number of small flashlights he'd packed for the trip.

Undoubtedly they're looking hard for the people who carry Al Queada training manuals.

Publishers and Rejecting Winners

Last Sunday there was an amusing New York Times article by David Oshinsky. The topic was how at least one publisher - Alfred A. Knopf, whose long-time editor Ashbel Green is retiring at the end of this year - had managed to turn down a host of promising books, including Anne Frank's diary ("a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions"), Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth (Americans weren't "interested in anything on China"), and George Orwell's Animal Farm ("impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A."). Other rejects? Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anaïs Nin, Sylvia Plath, and Jack Kerouac.

What is interesting is to remember that this type of article appears periodically, and people always seem tickled by the fallibility of publishers' sensibilities. But the story is hardly new. Walt Whitman had to self-publish Leaves of Grass at first. Dozens of publishers snubbed the original Chicken Soup for the Soul and What Color is Your Parachute - neither on the same literary level, but evidence that the publishing world can't even reliably predict tastes of the mass market. And with the growing demand for authors that have a "platform," it makes me wonder how many resoundingly good books, stories, poems, essays, biographies, histories, and other works of the mind fall to the wayside, never to be seen other than by friends and family.

Used Booksellers Skew Older

If you're curious as to who is selling used books online, AbeBooks.com, which operates a network of such dealers, has some answers. The company surveyed 1,949 online sellers that do business with it and found that 79% are over 45, most were in white collar jobs, and 20% work 51 or more hours a week. Many are on the road buying books, 60% operate strictly online, and a third read between five and 10 books a month. So much for graceful early retirement.

A Picture of Political Word Influence

This site has an interesting analysis of the purchase pattern of top moving political books. The influential books are those that connect distinct political philosophies - the ones read by people in both the "liberal" and "conservative" camps (though I think the break-out is pretty inaccurate when you actually talk to people). The site also has a white paper by the owner on the subject of book networks as well as some links to articles in the popular press.

15 Sites for Free Online Books

When I wrote about DailyLit.com, I thought of Bartleby.com and Project Gutenberg, which got me wondering about other online spots for free books. Got the itch to read but nothing new at hand? Here are 15 places to scratch:

UPenn: The Online Books Page (25,000 free books from the University of Pennsylvania)

Internet Public Library (not just books, but also some of the best research archives of online resources you'll find)

eLibrary (directory of ebooks with over 330 free titles)

Project Gutenberg (17,000 free public domain ebooks)

Bartleby.com (classic literature and reference books)

Read-Print (Thousands of free classics)

bibliomania (free classics, some references, articles, and interviews)

Children's Books Online (online antique illustrated children's books)

FreeTechBooks.com (free online computer science and programming books and lecture notes)

Classic Bookshelf (free online classics with a customizable interface)

Daily Lit (get free classics sent to you via email on a daily basis, chunk at a time)

Page by Page Books (hundreds of online classics in an online page format)

Great Books and Classics (great books from many fields; not just the "usual suspects")

Turning the Pages (online gallery of rare manuscripts from the British Museum)

Classic Reader (classic books, plays, poetry, and drams online)

Serialized Books by Email

I was doing a bit of research, updating the materials for a course about online research that I've offered to journalists when I stumbled across DailyLit.com. The site has over 250 public domain books. You choose something you'd like to read and the service sends you the book in chunks, each of which can be read in about five minutes, on a regular basis. You can even specify what days and times you'll receive updates. You can search for books by title, author, or category, and if you finish one of the installments and want more, you can get it delivered immediately. Imagine: Dante's Inferno in 38 easy reading installments.

No Joy In Bookstoresville For Harry Potter Won't Strike Out

Book stores are braced for the waves of people who will be pouring through the doors to pick up a copy of the final book in the Harry Potter series. But they're not smiling. According to Reuters, competitive pressure has driven down what sellers can get for the volume to such low levels that many will make hardly anything from it. And I have a funny feeling that most people aren't picking up a second book to go along with it. It brings to mind the old business saying: We'll lose a little on each sale but hope to make it up in volume. But then, you never do make it up.

"Got a Deal, Woe is Me"

The New York Observer has a somewhat amusing piece about the pain some authors find when actually going about their business of writing books.

But the humor is pretty dark and condescending if you're in the business. I don't know why so many writers seem to go on and on and on and on and ... well, you get the idea. It's a litany of self-pity that more shows how clearly off-balance some writers are. Of course, some of the journalists quoting these authors may just want to believe that working a staff job or concentrating on something other than books they can't sell is better than writing a book. Or perhaps the people working the media beat have perverse senses of humor.

Amazon to Cut Number of Visible Reader Reviews

An article on gather.com notes that Amazon.com is reducing the number of visible customer reviews of books. Only three reviews will appear on the page with the book, and those will be the ones voted "most helpful" by others. New reviews will head right to a link page with all the reviews. So book sales are going to be heavily influenced by three reviewer voices per title.

I know that at times I've used Amazon I look at the reviews, see if there's a pattern, and then jump to other reviews if there seems to be some real disagreement. But three reviews? Hardly seems enough opinion - which is really pretty amusing, given how often in other areas I find myself heavily influenced by a single "professional" reviewer, who might know less than I do.

Journey to Success - in a Clown Car

The Associated Press had a great article yesterday on Monica Drake, the author of the novel Clown Girl. The intro on a project that took about a decade to get recognition was fine, but the really amusing part came in the time line - one agent after another, one rejection after another, one odd meeting after another, becoming friends with Chuck Palahniuk, who eventually touts her novel on his site, after which the first edition sells out.

This looks like another title to add to the reading list. Just what I needed. I think my shelf has become the clown car, with more spilling off of it than ever could fit on in the first place.

Writer Reality TV

Clearly someone in the entertainment industry has finally cracked. A new show called The Ultimate Author is looking for contestants - who will compete for a book deal and the chance to spend a year learning how to promote the final tome. Yes, folks, you too can jet down to Ft. Lauderdale in June and wilt while you wait to see if you have what it takes to be freakishly bookish. And compelling television this will be, as the show's site explains:

Contestants in this competition must be smart enough to spell well, creative enough to coordinate a themed book club gathering, savvy enough to handle an ambush interview, wise enough to develop an effective marketing plan, and talented enough to help design an eye-catching book cover.

Every week there's a new genre and contestants have two hours to write a chapter. Two hours? Anyone on this show actually ever write a chapter of anything? Let's see - 3,000 to 5,000 words in two hours means typing anywhere from 25 to 42 words a minute on the average without a break and no thought and planning. Oh, yes, this will be interesting reading. I can hardly wait to see the footage of people. Sitting. And. Typing.

How dynamic.

Book Publishers Say We Give Up - You Decide

Here's a link to an item I ran in my BizBlast blog because it should be near and dear to the hearts of readers: book publishers looking for audiences to tell them what to publish. At least they're starting to tacitly admit that they never knew what they were doing in the first place...

The Print Versus Blog Review Wars

The LA Times ran something on a possible rapprochement between print and blog literary reviewers. I didn't kow that there was a fight between the two sides, but am not surprised. There is a power hierarchy in the literary world, and reviewers - mistake me not, often performing a good service of discussing things worthy of attention - are often the gatekeepers. They don't like losing that status, but someone should point out that they're going to lose it anyway. One newspaper after another has been dropping or reducing book sections. Some of the analysis in the article was flawed, I think, as in this example:

Still, the numbers are telling: The literary blogs are reaching a small audience. While larger newspapers have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, the Elegant Variation, for example, has an estimated 5,000 to 7,500 hits a day, while Champion's Return of the Reluctant is averaging 40,000 visits a day.

That's comparing apples and oranges. If all those readers were paying attention to the book section in papers, you can bet that the editors and publishers wouldn't be cutting their sections. What newspaper could get 40,000 people a day, every day, to read a book section? If long-time reviewers are truly worried about the level of discourse, and not their own paychecks or control over an art form, then let them join in online, or possibly teach workshops for those who would like to review. Or let them start their own blogs. This is a time where authors are becoming publishers. Why not find a place in the new order?

Books Big with Former Soviet Bloc Countries

BusinessWeek had an article about the success that German publisher Bertelsmann has had in Ukraine and other former Soviet bloc members. In fact, print is big in many parts of the developing world. Given that many people in these countries haven't the prosperity of economically developed western nations, I'm guessing that not needing an investment in a computer and Internet connection helps magnify the relative low cost of the book offerings. And since they're reading so much, it makes you wonder which nations are the really developed ones after all.

Cookbook Review: Fonda San Miguel: Thirty years of Food and Art

I reviewed this cookbook on my food blog, so instead of repeating the whole thing here, I'll offer this link.

Dangerous Book for Boys

The title pretty much says it all. The Dangerous Book for Boys, a hit in Britain, is a trip back into times when play was simpler, maybe riskier, but probably no more dangerous in the long run:

Exuding the brisk breeziness of Boy Scout manuals and Boy’s Own annuals, “The Dangerous Book” is a childhood how-to guide that covers everything from paper airplanes to go-carts, skipping stones to skinning a rabbit.

Probably more fun, as well. Nothing like making your own invisible ink or a tree fort - though from what I remember of my kids growing up, such things are perhaps less unusual than some concerned adults might think. As for excluding girls with the title, here's what Conn Iggulden, co-author with his brother Hal, has to say:

“It’s not exactly that we are excluding girls, but we wanted to celebrate boys, because nobody has been doing it for a long while,” he said.“I think we’ve come through the period when we said boys and girls were exactly the same, because they’re not. Boys and girls have different interests, different ways of learning, and there’s no real problem in writing a book that plays to that, and says, let’s celebrate it. Let’s go for a book that will appeal to boys.”

Supposedly Penguin is already planning The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls. Instead of water bombs, tree forts, and go-carts, the fare will be elderflower cordial and cat's cradle. Sounds like getting short-changed to me.

Fatal Feminine Sales - When Buzz Doesn't Bump Book Buying

The New York Times had an interesting story about the lack of sales on either side of the work outside the house/stay at home mothering debate. At the heart of the article is the premise that although they get tremendous media attention, "these so-called mommy books fail to transform their talk-show and blogosphere buzz into book sales." Instead of reading, women debate the titles based on summaries or excerpts but don't buy copies.

That may seem odd, but it's really not. As many businesses learn, getting press doesn't necessarily turn into sales. Eventually, if people are going to shell out money for something, they have to feel that they're going to get something from it. With a topic that gets so polarizing, those who agree might not buy because they already "know" they're right, and those who disagree are just as sure that the book will be wrong, so why bother? I suspect that many of the nasty political books only do well because they dish the dirt on someone, which is almost irrestible to most people.

College Basketball Player Told No Book or No Play

This is one of the most ridiculous stories I can remember. A University of Arizona basketball team forward, Fendi Onobun, was one of a group of six sophomores who had written a book called The Nerdy McFly Manifesto. Was is the operative verb of being - or not being, since he won't be credited as one of the authors. Why? Because the NCAA says that it would mean he was making money off his name and image, and so would make him ineligible to compete.

Here's the NCAA Division I bylaw 12.5.2.1:

Advertisements and Promotions Subsequent to Enrollment - Subsequent to becoming a student-athlete, an individual shall not be eligible for participation in intercollegiate athletics if the individual:(a) Accepts any remuneration for or permits the use of his or her name or picture to advertise, recommend or promote directly the sale or use of a commercial product or service of any kind, or(b) Receives remuneration for endorsing a commercial product or service through the individual's use of such product or service.

The student authors have a web site. Although Onobun's name and picture were supposed to come down from the site, there are still images of a half dozen students, it may be that his image still appears there.

Because the book hasn't been published yet, he hasn't technically profited and so can keep playing. Heaven forbid that anyone other than the university and the NCAA profit from his name and image, or that college sports promote the concept that athletes might be able to read and write and excel at things other than putting paying customers in the stands.

Book Authors Lamenting Publishing

Those who writer books often complain about the publishing industry, and some you have to take with a grain of salt. But I've been talking with colleagues, editors, and lawyers at the annual conference of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and much of what you could hear has been frustration. Writers are frustrated with publishing companies that, as a whole, can't seem to move beyond how they've always sold books and even thought about books. The authors often get tired of pitching ideas that go nowhere, or knowing that they will have to do all of the marketing because the publishers won't past the first three months, and often the efforts right after a book comes out are still hard to see. The premium is for the writer with a "platform" - the ability to provide a pre-existing audience and virtually guaranteed sales. And then, to top it all, the publishers are often highly inefficient and clumsy in how they operate, so even the corporate drive for more profits are frustrated. top management would do far better with fixing their in-house systems so that they didn't waste so much time and money. Then they could afford some chances and the possibility that they might actually find the next big thing by doing something that no one else is rather than by doing only what others have before. Until then, I don't hold out much hope for reading that startles you with its originality.