Category: publishing

“It’s not news that “word of mouth” has become a business model in the book industry. But E.L. James, a forty-nine-year-old former television executive from West London whose real name is Erika Leonard, has exceeded the sales feats of previous reader-discovered authors by such a staggering magnitude that she is in a category of her own.”

Jake Adam York provides a taxonomy, complete with maps and legends.

“Postmodernism had, I think, tremendous predictive power–it predicted how the world was going to be. Now even a politician will talk about, how am I going to spin this. It’s all knowing, and wised up, and confessedly wised up, in a way that it didn’t used to be, before. But as a genre it was naturally kind of disappearing up its own ass.”

“Man Booker prize judges focused on ‘novels not novelists’ and ‘texts not reputations’ today, to come up with a longlist that overlooks some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction, including Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis.” (Don’t worry, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies is there.)

“I don’t teach writing classes anymore, and I’m really glad I don’t, because I would feel very strange about telling people, ‘Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.’ I mean, ha.”

“A pair of Irish researchers conducted a sophisticated statistical analysis of three canonical texts, and concluded they give plausibly realistic portraits of their respective societies–once you remove certain obviously fantastical elements, and assume certain characters are actually composites.”

“What we call ‘genre fiction’ … strips away the usual and familiar contexts of our lives and replaces them with radically simplified environments: a small crew on a spaceship, a detective trying to stop a killer before he can reach another victim … It is often said that such situations are unrealistic. This is incorrect; it conflates the unrealistic with the uncommon. People do confront such utterly decisive moments: A theater full of people in Aurora, Colorado confronted one quite recently.”

“Given the decreasing income of writers over recent years–one thinks of the sharp drop in payments for freelance journalism and again in advances for most novelists, partly to do with a stagnant market for books, partly to do with the liveliness and piracy of the Internet–are we to expect a corresponding falling off in the quality of what we read? Can the connection really be that simple? On the other hand, can any craft possibly be immune from a relationship with money?”

“If descriptive bibliography is like doing anatomy, the Hinman is a CAT scan machine. Developed in the late 1940s by the former naval cryptanalyst turned Shakespeare scholar Charlton Hinman, it is still used today to ferret out subtle typographical variations that the naked eye might fail to perceive — or go blind trying.”

“A young student has just struck literary gold, discovering four previously unknown stories written more than a century ago by Katherine Mansfield.”