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A Wish for the New Year
When exactly did Amazon become the generic for bookstore? When did it become accepted, standard policy to fill in the “available @” with only its name and not with the name of a particular bookstore? When did the letter go out to journalists at newspapers, magazines, blogs, commentators on public radio, and other radio and TV shows that Amazon deserved to be given hundreds of thousands of dollars of free advertising through the invocation of its name as the “go to” place from which to purchase books? The irony is that you cannot actually “go” there.
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Spoil the Plot, or Spare the Riled
Would you like to read a PW review that went something like this? “The butler turns out to be the murderer in the latest cozy from Jessica Fletcher. In a classic gather-the-suspects-in-the-parlor ending, the modern Miss Marple again IDs the culprit, this time by realizing the significance of the depth of sprinkles sunk into an ice cream sundae on a hot day, after several other characters—the pastor, the chiropodist, and the actuarial student—come under suspicion for a couple of chapters each.”
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One Way or The Other
Everyone knows publishing is in the process of deep structural change. As Richard Nash observed, those who are waiting for all the technological/e-publishing dust to settle and for things to “return to normal” are going to be intensely frustrated. There is no final state of rest in view. Change from here on out will be continuous, creating both the greatest possibilities and the deepest instability in the publishing industry.
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The Scarlet Letter
Not since Hester Prynne walked out of prison with an infant in her arms and “a rag of scarlet cloth” in the shape of the letter A has there been such public hue and cry as Amazon has provoked in the past few weeks. But one small publisher commends Amazon for being a key partner.
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You Can Fool Mother Nature
If you’ve ever had to board up the windows of your home and run for the hills because a monstrous storm was headed your way, you’ll understand what I faced last August. In a bizarre turn of events, it was also the moment I received an offer for my first novel.
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When a Reviewer Becomes the Reviewed
When reviewers have a book published, what retribution can they expect for their (surely unintended) sins? I’m not asking for argument’s sake, but because I’m about to learn.
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An Experiment
When Amazon began offering one free (ostensibly “borrowed”) e-book per month to members of its new Prime program, I was intrigued. I don’t know if a free digital book a month from Amazon is a good thing or a less-than-good thing, or whether the terms are good, bad, or indifferent. What I do know is that refusing to participate in Amazon Prime denies publishers, authors, and agents one thing they need most: data.
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How the (Publisher) Grinch Stole Christmas
Anyone who has been in the book business for more than two weeks knows that the Christmas selling season is absolutely crucial to a retail store’s success. Most bookstores do three or four times the business in December compared with any other single month of the year. It’s not even close.
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In Praise of Older Men (and Women) Writers
For the past three nights—during hours when I could have been sleeping or drinking wine with friends or writing my own past-deadline journalism—I sipped tea and compulsively read Jamil Ahmad’s novel, The Wandering Falcon. It’s a beautiful book, sure, but it’s also a wise book, and its author—a first-time novelist—is 80 years old.
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Barbies, Barking, and Boxes: How to Improve Author Events
At one of my first book events, I entered to find a grand total of three people waiting to hear me read. A few seconds into my remarks, a woman and her son stood, and the mother asked, in broken English, “No Thomas Train?” I wanted to scream, “Choo-choo!” to keep them there, but I shook my head and off they went leaving me with one rather bewildered woman who asked if I’d still be reading. I walked away from the podium, turned a chair to face her and said, “Of course.”
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The God Particle of Literature
If we can see the world in a grain of sand, as William Blake suggests, then surely all of world literature is contained in the humble asterisk.
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E-readers Are Tools Of Change
Albert Einstein once said, “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Having Albert on my side was a huge confidence booster at the recent O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt, as I prepared to tell conference goers that the best way to tackle illiteracy and poverty in Africa is to give children and teachers e-readers loaded with donated e-books. Because, as absurd as that idea may sound, it is brilliant—and, best of all, it is working.
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A Bookstore With a View
Over the past two decades, bookselling everywhere in the world has changed tremendously. I would like to show how big these changes were for me by telling you the story of Harmony, my book shop at Assi Ghat in Varanasi.
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Language Arts
The death of translation in the English-speaking world has been greatly exaggerated... but who has what it takes?
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A Lucky Author Gives Back
My first book, a memoir about rape as well as the education of a writer, was somewhat ironically named Lucky. It is a word I’ve come to use a lot these days, but now there is little irony attached. I have been lucky in my editors, Jane Rosenman and Asya Muchnick, women who roll up their sleeves and make work better.
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Selling to the English-Speaking World
We’ve often been told that only 3% of the fiction on sale every year in the English-speaking world has been translated from any other language. I can tell you it’s true. Agents try to be optimistic: “There is an increasing audience for translated fiction,” we say. “Look at Murakami and Stieg Larsson’s sales in the U.S. and U.K.”
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Defining ‘Library’
A few years ago, I opened the proceedings of a summit that brought together publishers, technologists, funders, and librarians by ripping the cover off a paperback book. I was attempting, feebly, to make a point about the inviolability of books.
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Twitter by the Numbers
There’s been a lot of talk about “followers” and “friends” and “likes” in social media. I agree that the size of one’s audience matters, but there are other numbers that are arguably better measures of impact and overall strength of one’s Twitter feed.
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Eye on the Prize
My spring ritual: reading the full-page list of John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship winners in the New York Times. Who do I know? Amy! Phillip! Kathy! Ben! Even good friends don’t tell you they’re applying. Accepting condolences for “No, I didn’t get it”? A writer would rather have a colonoscopy. No sane person expects to get a Guggenheim. How could they? It’s easier getting into Harvard. The odds are roughly one in 20.
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Unsettled
After six years of legal maneuvering, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on August 17, 2011, rejected a proposed settlement in a class action copyright suit filed by freelance writers against periodical publishers and electronic database operators—a decision, experts say, that will likely kill the beleaguered Google Book Settlement as well.
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