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I was reading this interesting article by Ann Patchett for The Atlantic and it was about book tours. The following quote struck me as odd:

We’re a country obsessed with celebrity, and trying to make authors into small-scale Lindsay Lohans does nothing but encourage what is already a bad cultural habit. Reading, no matter what book clubs tell us, is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

I understand Patchett’s point–and her other one about authors being inherently anti-social people–but book tours and publicity isn’t about turning everyone into a Lindsay Lohan.

Yes, we live in a world of celebrity (I, of all people, should know that!), but the author is as much the product as the book. It’s about culitvating a relationship between the author and the reader, so the reader, by virtue of knowing about the author or hearing the author speak, can divulge deeper into the book and become more likely to buy books by that author in the future.

Besides, what gives authors the moral authority to choose for what reasons people buy their books?

The article itself is fascinating and raises a lot of excellent points about the nature of selling books, book tours, and using authors as promotional tools.

I got an iPhone today. My luck in waiting only 10 minutes to get a phone is completely due to suckers like Matt who waited all day yesterday with a broken service system to get theirs, taking hours and hours to activate a single phone, leaving the Fido flagship no choice but to close yesterday with about a dozen phones left over.

The guilt eats at me.

It really does.

I went back and forth on getting this phone for a long time. What finally broke it for me was that I was truly disappointed that I didn’t have any way to Twitter throughout BookExpo while running around like a maniac. So this is my plan with my little phone. To Twitter and liveblog all the book events I attend, and maybe someday, to move this twittering from my personal account to the account of whichever publisher I’m working for at the time.

Also, unbeknownst to me, the iPhone has an amazing eReader application and public domain books are only 0.99. My dream of reading books from this phone is so much closer than I ever knew! Hopefully publishers will get on board with this format and make their books available to iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Any suggestions for making this machine as publishing-friendly as possible?!

And it hurt. But mostly it made me sleepy.

I wish I had a real excuse for why I’ve ignored this blog thing for as long as I have. The excuse is that I have a job now. Since March, I’ve been working as the Sales Assistant at Kate Walker & Company, a sales agency. It’s a bit hard to explain, because we sell books to book stores, not people. And the books aren’t ours. And my personal job is sales-free. It’s been going really well, I’ve learned tons, I like it a lot, but it’s made me sleepy. The change in schedule has nearly killed me these past three months (and it doesn’t help that I’m still blogging near full-time over at my other blogs). But I’m adjusting. I’ve actually started to do things during the week! So this is an exciting development that’s inspired me to actually use this blog again.

I doubt this will last very long. And I’m still not entirely sure what to do with this blog, whether it should be personal, publishing or somewhere in between. But I’ll figure it out.

On a side note, I’m working up the courage to submit a completely unsolicited “why Kate Walker & Company needs a blog” report. We’ll see how that goes.

The Boston Globe published a piece today that questions that validity of the non-fiction book Bringing Down the House, which inspired the recent hit film 21, starring Kevin Spacey. (I actually just read the book this weekend, and saw the film the weekend before that, but that proves no point other than I have no real social life.)

Both the author, Ben Mezrich, and his editor stand behind his book. However, as with A Million Little Pieces and Love and Consequences before, such a claim has spurred controversy and many readers are feeling betrayed.

While Sebastian Junger claims doing so is “lying,” on Papercuts. His argument is that “nonfiction is reporting the world as it is, and when you combine characters and change chronology, that’s not the world as it is; that’s something else.”

Mezrich ever intended for his book to be educational or representational of “the world as it is.” He tells the Globe that he “took literary license to make it readable.”

The Globe writes that such non-fiction trends are

Much like reality television shows, the shift is fed by the sense that what audiences want is reality, but packaged with an excitement and drama that the original facts lack.

And does anyone get truly angry that The Amazing Race, Survivor and the thousands of other shows like them, play with the idea of “reality”? I know it happens, but never with the vigor as it does in the literary world.

Non-fiction books, like reality television, has a spectrum. Television viewers don’t put the Discovery Channel documentaries and MTV reality shows in the same box. Why are non-fiction books treated differently? What literary high ground exists so that movies and television can take extreme creative liberties with “reality” with relatively little controversy and books cannot?

While publishers and authors should never misrepresent their books (and this is totally the case in some books!), readers need to take greater responsibility in recognizing and understanding why they are reading that particular book. Are you reading it to learn something? Or are you reading it for entertainment value?

Such critical thinking could even inspire greater debate around literature, the media and more.

Image by Falcifer. Licensed via Creative Commons.

I want this book.

Titled ABC3D and written by Marion Bataille, it’s sure to please any typography enthusiast. It’s too bad it won’t be for sale until October.

The other day, HarperCollins US announced a radical shift in their publishing policies when they launch a new imprint soon. The entire Wall Street Journal article is here, if you’d like to read it, but here’s the short version:

• Authors will no longer receive large advances
• Book sellers will no longer be able to return books
• They will no longer engage in co-op programs at book stores

I think, given the radically shifting book market, these are fantastic moves to be making. While they might initially lose authors with this model, it reverses the ridiculous “wait and see” approach of publishing– that is, throwing a bunch of money at a book and wait and see if it does well. It’s a much more efficient business model.

The Wall Street Journal argues that the largest impact on the publishing industry will be the non-returnable aspect of this new approach. I can’t help but wonder what this will do for the creative element of the industry.

According to WSJ, executive Robert S. Miller “thinks he will attract major authors who have a book in the desk drawer that doesn’t fit their image, as well as up-and-coming writers.”

Without books costing publishers so much money up front with expensive advances, they will be able to publish more books. And when you publish more books, the avenue opens for more authors and more voices to enter the publishing industry, and gives consumers more content to choose from.

According to HarperCollins executive Jane Friedman, who spoke to the New York Times,

At this moment of real volatility in the book business, when we are all recognizing things that are difficult to contend with, like growing advances and returns and that people are reading more online, we want to give them information in any format that they want (my emphasis).

I wonder how such a model would work for the Canadian publishing industry. Yes, the Canadian publishing industry isn’t nearly as competitive as the American one, but I believe such an approach would further solidify the mandate of furthering Canadian cultural production as well as streamlining the business side of publishing, as well as empowering book stores and consumers to select titles that are right for them.

The other day I received an email from a small American book publisher wondering if I would like a review copy of their latest book so that I could review it on my blog.

I write a whole bunch of other blogs and this particular one is Chic By Nature, a blog about environmentally friendly fashion and designers. The book in question is a book about becoming a more environmentally conscious consumer of fashion.

I jumped at the chance. Not only to receive a copy of a book I’d probably buy anyway, but also to participate in a more streamlined and niche oriented book marketing tactic. A review on a niche blog like mine would ensure the readers reading the review are more interested in the subject matter, and thus, be more likely to purchase the book.

However, there are several, justifiable questions a publisher needs to ask. Is the blog reputable? Is the author trust-worthy? How do they not know I’ll take my free book and run away into the blogosphere?

Here are a list of questions any pblisher should ask before sending a review book to a blogger:

• Is the content original and engaging? (Does the author have a brain?)
• Is there a community built around this blog? (Does the blog have readers?)
• Will the community engage critically with the review and the book? (Will they care about my book?)
• Do the readers of this blog match my target audience? (Will they buy my book?)

Considering the deceasing traditional media space being dedicated to books, the numerous micro-niche blogs out there, and the relatively low risk it costs publishers to ship a book to a blogger, to me, this needs to be a method publishers should consider to get their titles out there. Sure, my review might only translate into 3-4 sales and will never gain the renown of the New York Times, but those sales should re-coup the costs it took to send me the book and will probably result in exposure elsewhere on the net.

The only downside for publishers will be finding the resources to seek out the blogs and other smaller, non-traditional media that will match title for title with their lists. But as publishers become more web-savvy, this should become less and less of a problem.

So, if any other publishers out there are interested, I also write several celebrity and television fan sites. And I’ll happily review books!

Image by robinhamman. Liscensed via Creative Commons.

Descant (one of my favorite literary magazines!) recently wrote a post about cleaning off the bookshelf. Some titles are impossibly hard to part with, no matter how embarrassing. Yes, I’m talking about my entire Baby-Sitters Club series. Others, not so much.

Their suggestions range from the charitable to the communal to the depressing, but they do have a point. You can’t hang onto books forever.

When you’re done with a title, what do you do with it? And what books can’t you part with?

Thanks to Descant, I recently discovered an online service called Book Mooch, where people all around the world can trade and share books.

All you do is sign up, type in the books you want to give away. Once they are given away, you receive a “point” which allows you to mooch a book you’ve been wanting to read off someone else. Read it and then keep it forever or return it to the mooching pile for someone else to enjoy.

It’s great way to meet fellow book lovers around the world, find that elusive out-of-print book you’ve been dying to read and to dispose of books you no longer need or want in a way thats helpful! It even has a handy Wish List feature, allowing you to acquire the books you’ve been dying to read.

Check it out for yourself here.

Papercut, the fabulous NY Times book blog, came up with the “seven deadly sins” of book reviews today–popular words in books reviews, used to sound “intelligent” and “literary.”

The list includes the gems poignant; compelling; intriguing; eschew; craft (used as a verb); muse (used as a verb); and lyrical.

In the comments section, nuanced, subtle, masterful, magisterial, engaging, and luminous, among others, came up.

Would a review saying something like (stolen from Papercut, because it’s way better than the review I concocted!) “Mario Puzo’s intriguing novel eschews the lyrical as the author instead crafts a poignant tale of family life and muses on the compelling doings of the Mob” entice you to pick up the book and read it? Probably not.

If the above words may never be used in reviewing a Sophie Kinsella novel, why should they be used in a review about the latest Ondjaate novel? Wouldn’t doing so further alienate certain readers? I’d argue that not only is this language unnecessary, it can be inaccessible.

I wonder if we need to review how books are reviewed. Who reads book reviews? And why? And, given the changing media and social spaces today, where are book reviews going? How would such elaborate and flowery language translate on Facebook and other social media sites, where you get a sentence to attract readers to your review? Or, more interestingly, Twitter? How would you write an effective book review in 140 characters?

That being said, when such words are used correctly, they’d make for a powerful and persuasive review. But reviewing literature doesn’t mean trying to write literature. Don’t write like you’re smart, just be smart. Then the review will be fantastic.

And if you’re really smart, you’ll show me how to write a review in 140 characters. Or less.

Image by Zephyrinus. Licensed via Creative Commons.