Book News, In Brief

Vertigo Books, a Washington DC bookstore on the verge of going out of business, has taken an unusual course of action in an effort to save themselves: They're asking their customers to watch a documentary about other bookstores at risk of imminent death. (My grandfather used to say, "You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar." But even Grandpa -- God rest his senile ol' soul -- would have to admit that fresh corpses also attract their share of flies.)

What sells books like Obama's byline? Obama's recommendation. Via Chapters & Verse: Barack Obama mentioned his respect for Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln many times as a candidate, and now it looks as if the President-elect has promoted his first bestseller (by another author). With the title theme dominating media discussion of Obama’s potential Cabinet selections, Goodwin’s book has now cracked the top 20 at both Amazon (currently at No. 12, even though the paperback is out of stock there until November 23) and BN.com (now at No. 11).

Here's a secret most authors and publishers won't admit to: Film adaptations hurt book sales. A bad movie can kill a book forever, but even a decent film slows sales to a certain extent. (Disagreeing bookstores ought to compare their sales of The Lord of the Rings pre-films to post). With this in mind, we at the Inkwell have been wondering how this Friday's Twilight movie release will effect sales of The Mormon Vampire Books to End All Mormon Vampire Books. Oh, sure, the books are selling at a very steady clip now, but we couldn't help but worry that a dud adaptation might kill this Christmas' seemingly 'sure thing' sales. Then we saw the footage of Twilight star, Robert Pattinson, at a Philadelphia mall and read the various accounts of the Twilight stampede at a mall in San Francisco, and we breathed a little sigh of relief. Sure, this series won't sell forever, but considering the cult-like adoration of its current fanbase, it'll for damn sure sell through the new year.

Books on the Nightstand

Michael Kindess and Ann Kingman, two of our favorite sales reps (Random House), have a new blog called Books on the Nightstand. Now the whole world, not just New England booksellers, has the opportunity to partake of their special blend of passion, insight, and sheer enthusiasm for books! Listening to their podcasts made me want to take the day off and read for the next 10 hours straight. They are that persuasive when talking about books and authors that they love. Check out their blog & podcasts the next time you crave a good book. (Two books I'm adding to my must read list based on their suggestions are: Any Human Heart by William Boyd and Peace by Richard Bausch.)

Book News, In Brief

Massachusetts is supposed to be too liberal for this sort of small-minded crap. Care of Boston.com: A long-running bestseller, "The Lovely Bones," tells the story of a 14-year-old girl who was raped and killed by a neighbor. The book remains popular in local libraries and soon will be made into a movie. But in Waltham, a local parent says the novel by Alice Sebold is too graphic. She wants it removed from the shelves of the library at the John W. McDevitt Middle School. "I read it cover to cover. They say this book is about healing and hope, which it's not," said Diane Thompson, who has two daughters at the school. "The guy committing the crime doesn't get punished. The mom runs away from her family."

An Ian Fleming biography has been ordered pulped by the powers that be for including several court documents from the notorious Thunderball plagiarism case. What's the notorious Thunderball plagerism case, you ask? (It's okay. I'd never heard of it, either.) According to the Australian.com, Fleming took the story from a Bond-based film script he and a couple of other guys had written and turned it into his bestselling book -- claiming sole authorship. In 1963, Fleming had to pay costs of £50,000 to Kevin McClory, the film producer who had developed the storyline with him. The case took its toll on Fleming's health, causing heart problems, and he died just nine months later aged 56. McClory died two weeks later, the victim of a bullet shot from the end of a Montblanc fountain pen. (Okay, so that last part isn't true.)

The new publishing model: Everyone gets published. Offering this hyperbolic "everyone" $1.50 for every 1,000 page views that their writing garners is Associated Content, a site co-founded by Google advertising honcho Tim Armstrong and his former college roommate, Luke Beatty. Here's how it works: Once a submission is run through Associated's "yield management system," the company then sends the writer a one-time, up-front fee that typically ranges from $4 to $20. Additionally, Associated pays contributors $1.50 for every 1,000 page views their article generates. Associated then distributes the story directly to specific websites that are in its network, but also on its own website. A good - or, rather, well-read - article can generate its creator a few hundred dollars, but most submissions are geared toward a more limited audience with a specific interest that traditional media companies wouldn't produce an article about. Geoff Reiss, the company's CEO, says that so far, the site has "published" 380,000 articles, and is adding 1,000 a day.

Book News, In Brief

First they did it to Chuck Berry, now they're doing it to Osamu Tezuka. Via Publisher's Weekly: "As the market for manga in America continues to grow, one of the top publishers, Tokyopop, has made a push to distinguish its OEL, or 'Original English Language' manga created by non-Japanese writers and artists." Tell me, what is it with White people and their appropriation of other people's sh*t? Did they peak with spray cheese or something?

Now we're never gonna be sure if the man with the world's longest fingernails is actually the man with the world's longest fingernails, or if he really even exists. Via Publisher's Weekly (again): "Ripley’s Takes Over Guinness. In a deal for the record books, the privately-held Jim Pattison Group has acquired Guinness World Records from HIT Entertainment for an undisclosed price. Among the Pattison Group’s holdings is Ripley Entertainment," a.k.a. Ripley's Believe It Or Not. Isn't this what they refer to as a 'conflict of interests'?

The Free Comic Book Day website has announced this year's giveaways. Included in the illustriously titled 'Gold Sponsor Offerings' are Simpsons and Futurama comics, the Transformers Animated FCBD 2008 Edition, All-Star Superman #1, Hellboy/B.P.R.D., Project Superpowers and a 2008 Shonen Jump sampler. Humbled by their 'Silver-level' status are Disney's Gyro Gearloose FCBD 2008 Edition and Gumby's Coloring Comic Book Special(?!). This year's Free Comic Book Day will be on May 3, 2008. You can visit the Free Comic Book Day website for the names of stores participating in your neck o' the woods.

DC Comics has paired six different anime directors (Satoshi Kon, among them) with six American comics writers (including Brian Azzarello and Greg Rucka) and told them to make six different Batman anime/animated shorts. Here is the trailer/making-of puff piece.

Book News, In Brief

James Frey has a new book, and this time he's admitting it's fiction. All of you crybaby bi**hes who loved A Million Little Pieces until you found out it was fake oughtta be the first ones in line for this one. After all, you were clearly impressed with his prose. Oh, but you say that you're the sort of reader that can only enjoy a book about suffering, effed up junkies when you think that the effed up junkies were really suffering, right? Yikes. Remind me to keep you away from small children and defenseless animals.

Via the generically titled, Daily News Tribune: "Leah Bruosta’s fifth-grade class knows the ins and outs of running a magazine. Over the last few months, Bruosta’s class at MacArthur Elementary School met with student authors, reviewed material and crammed to meet the deadline for the recently published school literary magazine, The MacArthur MacAuthors."

While one has to commend Bruosta for coming up with such a cool project for her students, one also has to admit that a literary magazine is about as relevant to today's world as a steam engine railroad car. (Editor's Note: Or a less-than-literary, literature-themed blog.)

There was a time when MAD Magazine was one of the sharpest, funniest, most subversive works of satire on the news stand. It was SPY magazine for kids, and The New Yorker for Jersey residents. Hell, even Alan Moore credits it as being one of the foremost influences on his writing. Unfortunately, for the past few decades, Mad Magazine has been little more than a weak pastiche of pop culture parodies and fart jokes. But could all of that be changing? Yesterday's NYTimes spilled the beans on MAD's hiring of ten Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonists to illustrate "Why George W. Bush Is in Favor of Global Warming." I guess we'll have to wait until next Sunday's paper to see if MAD has got The Daily Show's writers scripting their Cloverfield lampoon.

(Click here for a slideshow of MAD Magazine's global warming cartoons.)

Book News, In Brief

Stephen King reviews the Kindle for Entertainment Weekly. He likes it, but doesn't believe that it will replace traditional books. (For those of you keeping score -- Brick and mortar booksellers: appeased. Amazon.com: similarly appeased. And that, folks, is why King could have been a high ranking politician had he not found contentment as an internationally known, bestselling, millionaire author.)

Nabokov's son has come forward with a manuscript that his father never quite finished, one that Nabokov Sr. specifically asked to be destroyed should he die before its completion. The moral conundrum: Do we respect the artist's last wishes, or treat the world to what might be the makings of a literary masterpiece? Kathryn Hughes mulls it over.

The credibility of Ishmael Beah's memoir A Long Way Gone is about to get smashed into A Million Little Pieces. According to The Guardian UK, "Beah was 15 (years old) and not 13 when he was recruited into the army and that he therefore served only a few months as a child soldier and not two years as he has claimed in the book." Oh, and Oprah has had Beah on her show, so expect the proverbial 'second shoe' to fall shortly.

PR-Inside lists nine bookstores worth taking a vacation to visit. No, our store is not on there. If it was, this would've been given its own post (or at least an accompanying photo).

In Defense of Third Person Omniscient

Yesterday, a customer asked me if I could find him some recent fiction written in the third person omniscient point of view. ('T.P.O.' as I'll refer to it from here on out, is when a story is told from the perspective of a god-like narrator who can see every character's actions and thoughts.) My initial reaction was, damn, what a stupid way to find something new to read. Then I set off around the store to find one. But you know what? I couldn't. Not one. It seems that the majority of the novels being published today fall into one of two p.o.v. camps: first person ("I did this," "I went there," etc.) and third person limited (a character's name is used instead of "I", but chapter to chapter, scene to scene, we get to 'hear' the thoughts and 'see' the observations of whichever character is being featured).
So what the hell happened to T.P.O? Looking around online, the majority of folks seem to deride it, calling it "head-hopping," or "lazy writing." Another common claim is that publishers frown on it because it "creates...distance between the reader and the story," while "making it hard to form any emotional attachments to the characters."
Well, I say mother-eff those folks. T.P.O. is the Robert Altman of fiction -- a unique and exciting way to experience the lives of a wide variety of characters, all at the same time. And to call it "lazy" is ludicrous. Switching back and forth between the p.o.v. of a group of characters in a manner that never confuses...that's anything but easy. Jane Austen used to use the T.P.O., and she's no slacker. J.R.R. Tolkien did, too, and he was a literature professor. Hell, even your mother and/or father used T.P.O. when they told you bedtime stories, and that supposed 'distancing' never stopped you from peeing the bed in terror, did it?
In closing, let me pass on this quote from Molly Maquire, herself quoting Stephen Koch. The two of them sum it up perfectly:

"Whenever arguments over the sanctity of certain POV protocols arises, I think of Koch's take on the furor:

'Too often, this rather fussy doctrine pointlessly constricts writers’ options and narrows their range. As for the claim that the reader can’t follow multiple or shifting points of view, it is simply false on its face. The whole history of the novel is testimony to the contrary, from Jane Austen to Thomas Pynchon. In masterpiece after masterpiece, the narrative point of view readily changes from page to page, or even from sentence to sentence and only delights as it does so. In fact, one of prose fiction’s grandest strengths, which it exercises for once in effortless superiority over all other narrative media, including the movies, is its ability to dart in and out of any character’s mind at will. To forgo this splendid artistic advantage in the name of some pallid academic theory is really madness.'
–Stephen Koch, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, page 90"

2 News Bits, 1 Photo

Australia is buzzing about a hot new book that features hundreds of candid photos of sex, jealousy and betrayal...under the sea.

Do the often lurid and embarrassing covers of fantasy books actually hurt their sales? When even their regular readers think so, it may be time for the industry to re-think its approach.

Book News, In Brief

Via GuardianUK: "(Poet) Sean O'Brien has pulled off an unprecedented third victory in the Forward prize, taking this year's £10,000 prize for best collection with The Drowned Book." O'Brien says that it's not the awards that drive him, though. It's the groupies. The groupies and the coke.

Sheer silliness: The folks at BeaucoupKevin have taken still images from the goofy old Adam West Batman television show and captioned them with hard-boiled narration from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. The result is hilarious...for geeks.

The Washington Post's online outpost has just launched a podcast series titled The Book World Podcast. So far, their 'Book World' has a podcast population of two: one with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edward P. Jones and Robert Draper, the author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, the other with Jeffrey Toobin, a writer for the New Yorker and author of The Nine, and Paul Theroux, author of a new book of novellas, The Elephanta Suite. Registration is required.

Hardcover, Trade Paperback, Mass-market

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal covering Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, really gets interesting when it veers off into the old hardcover vs. trade paperback vs. mass market debate, and how it effected Gilbert's book's huge success.
An excerpt:
Ms. Gilbert's experience shows what a big influence fancy trade paperbacks are having on an industry that prices its mass-market paperbacks at about $7.99. Back in the 1970s, those smaller, rack-sized paperbacks were the blockbusters of the business, led by such best sellers as William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (11 million copies sold); Peter Benchley's Jaws (more than nine million copies), and Sidney Sheldon's The Other Side of Midnight (six million copies plus).

"One of the mantras of publishing economics of the 1970s and early 1980s was that mass-market paperbacks could achieve 10 times the sales of a hardcover," says Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Bertlesmann AG's Random House Inc. Then retailers started discounting hardcover titles, and the smaller, cheaper paperbacks lost ground.

Laurence Kirshbaum, a book agent who heads up LJK Literary Management in New York, estimates that the current ratio between hardcover and paperback sales is one to one -- mostly because so many hardcover books are so steeply discounted. "These days the bulk of the people who are interested in a book buy it in hardcover; that's what makes titles such as 'Eat, Pray, Love' so exceptional," says Mr. Kirshbaum. "They are throwbacks to the days when paperbacks sold huge multiples of the hardcover."

News Bits, In Brief

This is one of those News Bits I hate to publish, as every other book news site will already be covering it. Then again, if'n I choose to ignore it, we'll look like we never knew about it in the first place. So here goes: James Frey, the writer you love to hate, has a new novel coming out through HarperCollins in the summer of 2008. The fact that Frey has already been so thoroughly kicked to the curb over the faked authenticity of A Million Little Pieces (his Oprah appearance was especially/deliciously brutal), compounded with the fact that similar cases keep coming to light as of late (Augusten Burroughs, J.T. Leroy) makes me think that he might actually receive an underdog's welcome when he returns to the media spotlight. Sort of like Britney at this past Sunday's VMAs.

Jenna Bush's new children's book, Ana's Story, is getting rave reviews. When asked how she was able to put herself into the mind of a child, Jenna said, "I thought of how my Daddy talks. Then I made it sound a little less retarded."

BookBlog.net has a brief article about the oft-reported Death of Hardcovers. Their angle is the publishers' infrequent attempts at releasing high profile books in a variety of formats simultaneously (say, an equal number of hardcover and trade paperback, or a 75/25 trade paperback/mass market release). I like this idea, but the fact that they've been toying around with it for over twenty years now leads me to believe that it's not exactly the next big thing.

Will Self Publishing Soon Be Referred To As 'Rolling Your Own'?

A few weeks ago we highlighted a publisher's plan to sell classic literature specially designed to look like packages of cigarettes. It gets weirder. Now there's a company hoping to sell small books of poetry via cigarette vending machines. What? No flask bound fiction for us drunks?

The Murder That Refused To Die

What a year! First OJ announces that he's written a book 'imagining' his wife's murder, titled If I Did It. Then, following a huge media frenzy and a medium-sized public outcry, the book gets cancelled. (Quick question: Does anyone know if Simpson got to keep the $3.5 million advance?) Immediately after this is reported to the press, the Goldman family -- kin to the male murder victim, and one of the loudest voices calling for the book's cancellation -- files suit, asking for the publishing rights. Fast forward eight nail-biting months to last week, when the courts ruled in favor of the Goldmans' claim. As if on cue, the Juice re-appeared, saying that his 'hypothetical account of killing his ex-wife' was actually invented by a ghost writer and 'filled with errors that he refused to correct for fear of appearing to be guilty of the crime.' Okay, so even if that is true, why would OJ choose to come clean about it now? In hopes of killing sales (pun intended) when the book finally does hit stores. After all, who wants to pay hardcover pricing on a fake murder confession?! But that's not the end of the story. No, not nearly. This past Monday, the book's ghost writer, Pablo Fenjves, stepped forward for his fifteen minutes. This is his statement: "The whole book, the whole idea for a book, originated with O.J. Simpson and a couple of his handlers."
One can only wonder how Simpson will respond to this false allegation and obvious attempt to besmirch his good name. Murder, perhaps? Or worse -- another book.

Inappropriate Flair

Big Bad Book Blog offers three rules to remember regarding superfluous stylistic flourishes for the aspiring author.

1. Less is more. Like loud fabrics, loud literary devices are hard to mix and match. If you’re going to narrate in stream-of-consciousness, do not also use screenplay-style stage directions and scene breaks. Pick the device that means the most to you. Once you’ve chosen your gimmick, don’t overdo it. Think of that guy you saw last weekend wearing all hot pink plaid. Did you say, “Wow, I admire his consistency to his theme”?

2. Make sure someone gets it. Kurt Vonnegut recommended writing with an audience of one in mind. Whoever you’re writing for, test it out. If your audience doesn’t like your device, you may want to consider toning it down. Even if you’re not thinking of a specific person as you compose, a suitably sympathetic, unbiased reader ought to be able to get through the device without trouble. I’m thinking your editor here.

3. Most important, make sure it’s crucial and authentic to the work, not just something you’re doing to show off. Christopher Bachelder’s Bear v. Shark uses stream-of-consciousness narration with two-page chapters and commercial breaks as its main style—a highly disruptive format. But the book is a satire about a near future in which television screens have taken over all four walls of the room and no longer turn off, where advertising invades our thoughts and the attention span is a thing of the past. The method is the message—so Bachelder’s outré style doesn’t distract from his point. (Also, the book is short—the author doesn’t expect us to get through three hundred pages of this bizarre prose.) If your device isn’t integral to your work, you’re probably better off without it.

To read the whole kit-n-kaboodle, click here.

As A Writer, You Really Ought To Be Writing, But As Long As You're Reading, You Might As Well Be Reading Something That Relates To Writing, Right?

Today's links are dedicated to the struggling writers. May the published among us die so that the unpublished might find agents.

Can Writing Be Taught?

You bought the books, you took the classes, you even side-stepped your trepidation and joined the local published author's creative writing group. Does any of this really help you span the chasm between a blank page and a completed novel? Or are some folks just born to write, while others are damned to only dream of doing so? The Atlantic.com has a nice bit about this titled, So You Want To Be A Writer. In it, they reference everything from Balzac to Emily Dickinson to Fortune Magazine, all in an effort to try and explain the necessary combination of natural talent and hard work vital to every accomplished piece of writing.

Cuz Buying One Of Those 'For Dummies' Books Saps The Self-Esteem Right Out Of You

New writers (or long-time writers still struggling to get someone to read/publish/become groupies of their work) would do well to check out Jordan Lapp's ongoing blog, How To Succeed As A Writer (without really trying). He's been posting quite a few interesting internet conspiracy theories that relate specifically to the fledgling author's path to glory. Among them: the flaws in Amazon.com's Reader Reviews, the pros and cons of Writing.com, what role audience perception plays in a writer's success, and how to properly promote one's own work online.

$300 Says Maybe You Should Try Drawing Instead

Lynne W. Scanlon -- publisher, editor, author and blogger about all things book related -- writes a blunt, sensible piece for unpublished writers who "wail about not being able to find a literary agent or get published or get readers to buy direct." Her advice? Pay a professional reader to assess your work. After all, you may simply suck. Better to find out now than after you've spent another three years writing a second novel, right?

Click this link to visit her blog and read the whole article. (Have no fear. She's actually much kinder and gentler than I'm making her out to be.)