Category: publishing

“There have been more than 101,000 tweets since the beginning of the year in which a Twitter user said he or she was writing a book or novel. Levine says that Twitter offers a way for an agent to do a little research and determine if a writer actually has the chops in a given genre.”

1923: “The author has been compared to Rabelais. He has only in common with Rabelais a gust for and an exuberant command of words; a like avidity for verbal analogies and assonances, which he carries to a point characteristic of a peculiar mental aberration which used to be called puns, alliterations, or repetitions, which here and there flash into wit, or form an amusing or brilliant collocation of vocables, but more often make an echoing rumble which is not addressed to the intelligence; he flings about a lot of dirty words as well as crashing learned ones. And here all resemblance stops between the author of the inestimable life of the Great Gargantua and that of Ulysses.”

Sebastian Barry wins with On Canaan’s Side, which was up against hefty competition: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt, Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, Pure by Andrew Miller and The Quality of Mercy by Barry Unsworth.

“They carefully calibrate what can be communicated in English but not in Chinese; in Hong Kong but not in Beijing; online but not in print; via allegory but not direct exposition. The tank-to-tractor substitution — as well as related techniques, like taking advantage of Chinese’s rich store of homophones to substitute a sound-alike anodyne term for a politically charged one — illustrates how the ever-present censorship machine turns Chinese writers into verbal acrobats. Put more bluntly, it forces them to lie to get their voices heard.”

“To a large extent, it really is the best of times for publishing. We have a lot of potential to connect more people with more ideas more efficiently and quickly than ever before. We have more people reading and writing than ever before.” And specific examples abound.

“The app uses Joyce’s masterpiece as a window into the tastes, smells and sounds of Dublin at the turn of the century. It takes users along the route of [Ulysses‘] characters, as well as past locations from Joyce’s book Dubliners.“

“We looked at 742 books reviewed, across all genres. Of those 742, 655 were written by Caucasian authors (1 transgender writer, 437 men, and 217 women). Thirty-one were written by Africans or African Americans (21 men, 10 women), 9 were written by Hispanic authors (8 men, 1 woman), 33 by Asian, Asian-American or South Asian writers (19 men, 14 women), 8 by Middle Eastern writers (5 men, 3 women) and 6 were books written by writers whose racial background we were simply unable to identify.”

“The transition from print to digital is likely to entail much more than a mere change of medium — it has the potential to profoundly alter the very process of knowledge production.”

“Andrew Hyde wrote and self-published a great-looking travel book and put it up for sale on Amazon … but he got some sticker-shock when he found out that Amazon was charging very high ‘delivery fees’ for his books, even when the buyers were buying from WiFi.” The fee: “$2.58 per download + 30% of whatever you sell” – a markup Hyde calculates to be roughly 129,000%.”

“This is not a particularly revolutionary thesis, of course; reading is often seen as quintessentially empowering and freeing. But is it?” Well, it beats illiteracy, obviously. Yet, for one example, “Harlequin romances, Gothic romances, and soap operas addressed women’s anxieties and concerns – not in the interest of freedom, but rather in the interest of reconciling them to their lot in patriarchy.”