interesting post from Sarah Weinman's blog:

There is no better tonic than hard numbers.
And because writers are an obsessive lot -- phoning Ingram, checking Amazon, comparing their recent advances to others, wondering what the hell royalty statements really mean -- I thought that publicizing some actual figures might do the trick. Or at least stir up discussion.

Over a three week period this summer, the following sales numbers were recorded for a NYT bestselling thriller writer's most recent book:

B&N: 4,140
Waldenbooks: 4,888
Borders: 3,993
Anderson Merchandisers/Walmart: 47,671
Target: 16,341
Price/Costco: 17,291
Sam's: 14,108
Amazon: 320

I'm not sure what shocked me more: the unbelievably low number for Amazon, or just how powerful Walmart and Costco really are in the publishing business.

The author further adds:

For all their hype, the truth (and I've seen this with actual sales figures going back to 2000) is that Amazon numbers are tiny compared to virtually every other retail outlet.

Amazon makes their profit selling used books, not new ones. Maybe their low sales numbers was one of the determining factors to shift their focus toward used sales -- I don't know. But I do know that their numbers are insignificant to the pub in determining the success/failure of a book.

Surprised that some of the figures are so "low?" Bear in mind that a huge percentage of actual retail sales are from independents, grocery stores, pharmacies, outlets like that -- which don't report weekly numbers.

But the Walmart number is rather staggering, isn't it? It's one reason I put what little local/regional promotional efforts I do into cultivating Anderson reps and going on day-long road trips to sign and sticker stock for Walmarts. They get a hell of a lot of foot traffic, and sell a hell of a lot of books.

If there's a moral to the story (so to speak) it's that to get on the bestseller lists, it probably behooves the writer to get very friendly with the folks at Walmart." 7/26/2005


Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

Poll names 'top book group novel'

British book groups have voted Barbara Kingsolver's 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible, about a US missionary in 1950s Africa, their favourite read. Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time came second in the survey of groups entering the Penguin/Orange Reading Group Prize. Works by Khaled Hosseini, Andrea Levy and Tracy Chevalier were also in the top five books for reading groups.

The Poisonwood Bible was nominated for the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner awards.

More than 160 reading groups, with about 2,500 members, offered their all-time favourite books for the poll.

Modern classics

The top of the list is dominated by books published in the last decade.

Mark Haddon's work and The Kite Runner by Afghan-born author Khaled Hosseini, at number three, were both published in 2003.

Andrea Levy's Small Island, in fourth place, won the Orange and Whitbread prizes after being released last year while Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring came out in 2000. Classics on the list include To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee at six, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath at 12 and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre at 16.

Guy Pringle, one of the Reading Group Prize judges, said all the novels "struck a lasting chord with passionate readers".

"Reading groups have once again made up their own minds about what they want to read - in spite of publishers' marketing campaigns," he said.

"Word-of-mouth recommendation is clearly crucial, pushing new titles like The Kite Runner instantly on to the Reading Group bestseller list alongside old favourites."





BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts | Poll names 'top book group novel'

The Invisible Library

Want to read Jo March's "The Curse of the Coventrys" or Eccentrica Gallumbits' "The Big Bang Theory, A Personal View"? Sorry, you can't. They're fictional. Not books of fiction, but fictional books. These and all the other books listed in The Invisible Library are imaginary titles dreamed up by authors and referenced in actual works of fiction. Librarian Brian Quinette, with help from friends also obsessed with fictional fiction, has carefully cataloged hundreds of non-existent titles. Browse the names of real authors and titles to find the pseudo versions. From the "books" written by Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's novels, to the "Misery" series created by the fictional hero of Stephen King's "Misery," to the mysterious "Necronomicon" by H.P. Lovecraft's Abdul Alhazred, this library boasts lists of potentially rich reading material -- if only they existed.


Invisible Library

Literary bonbons

LAURIE MUCHNICK

June 26, 2005

Do you read chick lit? It's become such a bookstore staple that it's hard to believe it didn't even exist a decade ago. British journalist Helen Fielding is widely credited with having invented the genre with "Bridget Jones' Diary," which was published in 1996. That book was such a sensation that women writers stopped trying to emulate Jackie Collins' and Judith Krantz's over-the-top romantic confections and started writing stories about neurotic single women trying to have a cool career, lose a few pounds and find a man.

(By the way, what's Judith Krantz up to? She hasn't made an appearance on bookstore shelves since her memoir, "Sex and Shopping: The Confessions of a Nice Jewish Girl," came out in 2000, and her most recent novel, "The Jewels of Tessa Kent," was published in 1998. I think it's time for a comeback - especially since she's being used as a role model again. One of the most hotly anticipated books of this summer is an ultra-glamorous Hollywood novel called "Adored," by Tilly Bagshawe, who says she was trying to recapture the dishy, escapist fun of a Krantz novel. When "Adored" is published in July, we'll see if that's what people want to read these days; if it sells, I sure hope Judith Krantz has her computer warmed up.)

Getting back to the history of chick lit: After "Bridget Jones" hit it big, American publishers began looking for their own version of the "neurotic single woman looking for love" novel. Candace Bushnell's "Sex and the City" came out in 1996, about the same time as "Bridget Jones," but it didn't become a cultural phenomenon until the TV series started two years later. Since it takes a long time to write and publish a book, trends can take a while to blossom, and it wasn't until 1998 that American chick-lit novels began to appear. There was "Animal Husbandry" by Laura Zigman, and then, in 1999, there was "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing," by Melissa Bank. I can't remember if the term "chick lit" was in use by then, but I do remember Bank being promoted as the more literary version of Helen Fielding.

Why worry about all this now? Because Melissa Bank has just published her second book, "The Wonder Spot," and it's kicking up a storm of name-calling among women writers who do and do not embrace the chick-lit label. Curtis Sittenfeld, author of "Prep," wrote a scathing review in The New York Times Book Review which started off: "To suggest that another woman's ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut - doesn't the term basically bring down all of us?" But she doesn't let that stop her, going on to say that "The Wonder Spot" is, indeed, chick lit, because "its appeal relies so much on how closely readers relate to its protagonist," Sophie Applebaum, an upper-middle-class Everywoman who spends her time looking for love or even a job that she likes (and is good at).

I didn't disagree with Sittenfeld's negative assessment of "The Wonder Spot" - I didn't like it either, and even though I could certainly identify with Sophie I found the book incredibly boring - but I was troubled by her harping on the chick-lit theme. Novelist Jennifer Weiner, author of fun, unabashedly commercial novels including "Good in Bed" and "In Her Shoes" (soon to be a movie starring Cameron Diaz), brilliantly analyzed Sittenfeld's entire review on her blog, Snarkspot (jenniferweiner .blogspot.com). Weiner thinks (and I agree) that book reviews are at least as much about the reviewer as about the book being reviewed, and in this case, she thinks Sittenfeld is worried about her own place in the literary pantheon. Her book bears blurbs from Dave Eggers, Thisbe Nissen, Matthew Klam and other well-respected young writers, but as Weiner points out, if you look at her entry on Amazon.com, you'll see that one of the other books bought by the same people who bought "Prep" was "Bergdorf Blondes" - not exactly high culture.

So what's the moral of the story? There's good chick lit and bad chick lit, just as there's good literary fiction and bad literary fiction - and maybe these labels are useless, anyway. I can hardly count the number of times I've read reviews that say, basically, "This book is chick lit, but never mind, read it anyway, it's great!" I wrote something like that myself, last summer, when I raved about Sarah Dunn's first novel, "The Big Love," which has just come out in paperback and which I would recommend in a heartbeat. The plot is nothing unusual - girl loses boy, girl has fling with cute boss, girl gets boy back and has to decide what to do with him - but the narrator's voice is so engaging that it lifts the book right out of the run-of-the-mill and into the perfect-reads category.

I think there's been a brilliant by-product of the chick-lit tidal wave, and it's that smart, well-educated young writers who probably read Jonathan Franzen and Alice Munro in their spare time have embraced the idea that books can be enjoyable and intelligent at the same time. (Not that Franzen and Munro aren't enjoyable, but you know what I mean. They're not exactly light reading.) And this realization hasn't been limited to women writers, either. Think of Nick Hornby or Tom Perrotta, who write books that might have been called "lad lit" if that spinoff label hadn't been such a dud with the reading public. Other chick-lit spin-offs now include "mommy lit," including "I Don't Know How She Does It" by Allison Pearson and "Little Earthquakes" by Jennifer Weiner; and "worker lit," which began with "The Nanny Diaries" and continues with this summer's sharp "Twins of Tribeca," by former Miramax publicist Rachel Pine. There are even chick-lit mysteries; I've devoured the Bailey Weggins books by Cosmopolitan editor in chief Kate White, and am currently enjoying "Fashion Victim," by Sam Baker, the editor of Cosmo's U.K. edition. (Though it seems kind of weird to have the top editors of sister magazines writing such similar books, I say the more the merrier.)

Of course there are bad chick-lit novels, just as there are bad literary novels - I won't mention names. But as far as I'm concerned, every balanced reading diet requires a few bonbons, and I'm glad there are plenty of literary chocolates on the shelves to choose from.

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.


Newsday.com: Literary bonbons

Book and Reading Statistics

This showed up in my email box from Alan Nichter, Adult Materials Selection, Hillsborough County Public Library System and I thought it interesting enough to share.

Some startling statistics
by Robyn Jackson

So you want to write a book. Well, why not? So does about 80 percent of the United States population according to a survey by the Jenkins Group.

Anyone who has ever tried to find an agent or get a manuscript accepted by a publisher knows what a tough business writing is. Even if you do get your book published, there's no guarantee anyone will buy it.

The following statistics about book publishing and reading were found on www.parapub.com, the Web site of self-publishing guru Dan Poynter. They'll give you an idea of what you're up against if you want to write books for a living.

1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
57 percent of new books are not read to completion.
70 percent of books published do not earn back their advance.
70 percent of the books published do not make a profit.
(Source: Jerold Jenkins, www.JenkinsGroup.com)


53 percent read fiction, 43 percent read nonfiction.
The favorite fiction category is mystery and suspence, at 19 percent.
55 percent of fiction is bought by women, 45 percent by men. (Source: Publishers Weekly)
About 120,000 books are published each year in the U.S. (Source: www.bookwire.com)


A successful fiction book sells 5,000 copies.
A successful nonfiction book sells 7,500 copies.
(Source: Authors Guild, www.authorsguild.org)


On average, a bookstore browser spends 8 seconds looking at a book's front cover and 15 seconds looking at the back cover. (Source: Para Publishing, www.parapub.com)

Each day in the U.S., people spend 4 hours watching TV, 3 hours listening to the radio and 14 minutes reading magazines. (Source: Veronis, Suhler & Associates investment banker)

WHY I HATE CINGULAR WIRELESS

One of the best things about having a website is the soapbox it gives me to stand on. I had a wireless cell phone plan with ATT, and never really had a problem. Until Cingular bought them out or took over or whatever these cannibal companies do to each other. I have had problems with my bills every month since, including a new wrinkle that started about three months ago.

Every month I get a small charge on my bill, usually less than a dollar so I probably shouldn't even notice it, but it's for AOL Instant Messaging. I don't have an account with AOL and I don't use Instant Messager or Messenger or whatever it is. So I called Cingular and got a very bored woman who insisted I must have lent my phone to someone who then used AOL. As if. What am I, twelve years old? Everyone I know has their own damn phone and doesn't need to use mine. I was also told there were no supervisors available - how convenient - but that she would give me a once-in-a-year goodwill credit for the eighty cents. I explained I wasn't so concerned about the eighty cents, but I was concerned with the fact that it appeared someone was using AOL and I was being billed for it. She finally agreed to put something in the notes of our conversation, promising that someone would read it.

The next month it happened again, another small charge for AOL. I didn't bother to call. Then it happened again. This time only thirty cents but still, it's the principle of the thing. So I called customer service, went through fifteen minutes of voice mail, punching in numbers and horrible muzak before finally reaching Jason, who from the moment he said hellohowcanIhelpyou, had disdain dripping from every syllable and I knew it wasn't going to be good. I was dealing with a supercilious young man with a superiority complex. I tried to explain the problem to him and he gave me the same "you must have lent your phone to someone" spiel. I asked for a supervisor and was told none was available. I really tried to make him understand that I wasn't concerned with the thirty cent charge but with the fact that I hadn't lent my phone to anyone yet somehow AOL charges were appearing on my bill. He finally said he would talk to someone else and put me on hold. Eventually he informed me that he could shut off my Internet access which meant I couldn't use some of the features of the phone I paid for. I asked about any other options and was told take or leave it, he didn't really care what I did. I finally said go ahead and do it, my contract will be up shortly and I'll take care of it then. His reply was "piss off" and then he hung up on me.

I am forwarding a copy of this to Cingular and I trust that his name is on my records since supposedly he had the Internet service taken off my phone. I have only dealt with one competent person at Cingular, and she was with the corporate services department. Everyone else there has been ignorant, impatient, uncaring, unsympathetic and downright rude. I've been given completely erroneous information time and time again. No one has any idea of what is going on, what is the right thing to do, or how to make a customer happy. Or at least not aggravate them further. If I was Jason's boss, I'd fire him. Immediately. And then I'd sit down and read THE NORDSTROM WAY or another good management book and make all my employees read it too. And practice it. Good customer service doesn't cost any more than bad and can make a company a lot of money in the long run.

My contract ended and I am shopping around for new cellular service. If anyone is happy with their carrier and is in the south Florida region, I'd love to hear about it.

With Covers, Publishers Take More Than Page From Rivals
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

When a book hits stores with a cover nearly identical to another's, it's the publishing equivalent of arriving at a party wearing the same dress as the hostess. But while book jacket look-alikes may chafe publishers, it happens more often than you might think.

The image on the cover of Todd Hasak-Lowy's short-story collection, "The Task of This Translator" (Harvest Books, an imprint of Harcourt), released in June, shows a hat floating over a necktie-wearing headless man - nearly identical to the one on a 1999 story collection, Barry Yourgrau's "Wearing Dad's Head" (Arcade Publishing).

The hall of mirrors continues: both books appear to riff on Fred Marcellino's celebrated floating-bowler-hat illustration for Milan Kundera's novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," which itself appeared to be a homage to the Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte, who frequently depicted men with bowlers.

Sometimes the photographs on book covers are not just similar, but exact duplicates. Rather than pay photographers' day rates, most book designers turn to stock-photography agencies. Top agencies charge $1,200 to $1,500 a photograph, and twice that for exclusive rights, a premium publishers are loath to pay.

That's where the trouble starts.

Seven years ago, an edition of Mary Sheedy Kurcinka's "Raising Your Spirited Child" featured on its cover a stock photograph, from the Photonica agency, of a girl running with outstretched arms. Five years later, another parenting book, "Children at Promise," by Timothy S. Stuart and Cheryl G. Bostrom, featured the identical photograph, as does a recently released paperback version of the book.

Mary Schuck, senior art director at Harper Perennial, which published the first title, learned of the latter only recently, when directed to it on the Internet. "Oh, wow," Ms. Schuck said. "They used the same photo. It's just a huge mistake for this publisher to have done this."

At that other publisher, Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley, the look-alike cover also came as news.

"It's in all our best interests to make sure that image isn't already being used in the same medium," Jean Morley, Wiley's vice president of creative services, said in an e-mail message. "When our designers use stock art, they routinely ask if the image is being used for other purposes, and most stock houses will volunteer that information."

She added, "I suspect the reason this happened was probably because that information wasn't shared or possibly because we thought that first book was outdated or not directly competing in the marketplace."

"Raising Your Spirited Child" hardly appears outdated: the book was recently No. 38 on Amazon's parenting and families top-seller list; Wiley's "Children at Promise" didn't make that Top 100 list. (The older book's overall sales rank was 645; the newer was 314,488.) It's unclear how many bookstores stack them near each other; both address parenting, but only "Children at Promise" is Christian-themed.

David Neilson, the chief executive of Photonica, said in an e-mail message that "it's likely" Wiley was warned of the previous book cover: when a "client calls in to request a photo, we will check the image's history automatically."

In any case, neither publisher has any recourse against the agency, as neither paid for exclusivity. Ditto for Bloomsbury and Doubleday, which paid Photonica for nonexclusive use of the same photograph of a knee-socked woman, though used upside down in one case. The books - Melissa Pritchard's "Disappearing Ingénue" (Doubleday) and a British edition of Jeffrey Eugenides's "Virgin Suicides" (Bloomsbury) - were both published in 2002, in May and October, respectively. Mr. Neilson said "crossover is likely to have been minimal," as "The Virgin Suicides" cover in the United States differs from the one in Britain. In British bookstores, however, the covers are likely to be the same: Amazon's British Web site shows the Pritchard and Eugenides books with the identical images.

As the covers of "The Task of This Translator" and "Wearing Dad's Head" suggest, photo agency rates do not explain all such cases. Book designers can wade into familiar waters even when they choose different photos. The cover of "The Task of This Translator" is "similar enough to other projects that someone should have a red face about it," said Giles Hoover, a book designer who with his wife, Amanda Smith, runs the book-design blog Foreword (www.ospreydesign.com/foreword).

"If I had done that, I would be super-embarrassed," Mr. Hoover said.

Jennifer Gilmore, director of publicity at Harcourt, publisher of "The Task of This Translator," said she had not been aware of the cover of Mr. Yourgrau's book. She said the similarities were "strictly coincidental."



With Covers, Publishers Take More Than Page From Rivals - New York Times

I read Julie & Julia and absolutely loved it - can't wait for the September pub date!

Anatomy of a Buzz: Julie & Julia
June 29, 2005
By Anna Weinberg

Julie Powell’s cooking memoir, Julie & Julia, could easily have gone the way of so many other blogger memoirs. (Anyone remember Save Karyn?)

Instead, Powell’s account of her year-long cooking project, in which she prepared every recipe in Julia Childs’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking while blogging about it, is one of the most highly buzzed books of the fall season. For those unfamiliar with the story, in 2003, Powell was a secretary living in Queens. Nearing 30 and hating her job, with little (she thought) to show for her life, she embarked on her epic cooking project in order to, as she wrote, “save myself from giving up entirely to dreariness and mediocrity.” With her profanity-laced blog detailing the daily struggles of cooking like Julia, Powell soon won the hearts of thousands of readers, and, by the end of the project, was fielding interview requests from NPR, CNN, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. With that kind of built-in media attention, a book deal was inevitable.

Little, Brown and Co. acquired the memoir in September 2003, just after the completion of Powell’s project on Aug. 26, 2003. “Everything kind of came together at the same time,” recalls senior editor Judy Clain. “I’d been reading Julie’s blog, then I read the Amanda Hesser piece in the New York Times on Julie’s project, and then I found out she had signed with Sarah Chalfant at the Wiley Agency—twelve hours later we were making an offer on the proposal.”

Following a bidding war involving several publishers, on Sept. 22, Powell announced triumphantly on her blog, “I have landed a book deal. A really obscene book deal. I am, in fact, officially What's Wrong With Publishing Today.” And they were ready to go. The only problem: How could they keep Powell’s story from spoiling during the two years from project end to book publication?

One way was to keep Powell blogging, albeit less frequently than she had been at the height of the Julie/Julia project. On her website, Powell continued to post for her loyal “bleaders” (blog readers) right up until Aug. 13, 2004, when she posted a moving tribute to Julia Child, who had died the day before. That post alone drew 113 comments from readers—nine months after Powell had announced she would be posting no longer.

The next step was to “put the galley in as many people’s hands as possible,” says the imprint’s associate publisher, Sophie Cottrell. “At BookExpo in early June, we gave out 3,000 galleys to booksellers and publishing industry folks, and the response was phenomenal.” (A Little, Brown luncheon in Powell’s honor was one of the higher-profile midday dining events of the convention.) Originally slated for February 2005, Julie and Julia was positioned instead as a Big Fall Book “because of all of the amazing in-house reaction and reaction from our sales force,” says Clain. “We decided to push it to September and have it open the catalog with a double-page spread.”

A Nexis search shows that Julie & Julia has been featured in the media at least eight times since May 9 (five months before its publication date), and the Internet is atwitter with talk of Powell (who—by the way—finally quit her secretary job) and her book. As Cottrell says, Julie & Julia has “such wide appeal that we’re expecting it to cross all types of reader demographics, but we have been getting a lot of early interest from women’s magazines, the hipper/edgier media outlets, and, of course, food-related media.”

Powell, who’s re-launching the blog this summer to reconnect with her readers, will also be going on a “sizeable” author tour in early October. Though Little, Brown hasn’t confirmed cities or stores yet, “response from booksellers has been extraordinary,” says Cottrell. “In as many places as possible, we plan on having bookstores collaborate with a local restaurant. The restaurant may even serve a Julia Child meal featured in Julie & Julia. Booksellers are embracing the idea of very special, unique events for Julie, which we love to hear.”

Even with ample and fulsome early praise, Cottrell and the publicity team at Little, Brown continue to hustle for the book. “The fact that Julie’s book had a platform and an awareness that most first time authors don’t have is extremely helpful,” says Cottrell. “We’re expecting to get major media coverage for the book, but we take nothing for granted—it still involves a lot of hard work.”

Anatomy of a Buzz: Julie & Julia

Major publisher makes ancient forest vow
Wednesday 06 July 2005

Publisher Random House UK has announced that it is to become ‘ancient forest friendly’ in its book production, in a move that has been widely welcomed by authors and green campaigners.

As one of the largest publishing houses in the UK, Random House’s pledge represents a significant victory for Greenpeace’s Book Campaign, which was instrumental in the company’s decision. To meet the requirements of the move, Random House will work with suppliers to use Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) accredited paper in its books.

Over 70 publishing houses around the world have now made the commitment to stop using ancient forest sourced materials in their books.

"The selection of the right paper is of vital importance from an environmental as well as a commercial perspective and I look forward to working with our suppliers to increase the availability of FSC certified paper,” explained Stephen Esson, Group Production Director at Random House. “Of course, any development of recycled grades more appropriate to the practical and commercial requirements of the book market would also be welcomed."

Greenpeace’s Belinda Fletcher praised the voluntary decision, and hoped that it would encourage other companies in the industry to adopt similar policies. "This commitment is the most comprehensive commitment developed by a UK publisher to date and sets a good example for other publishing houses to follow," she commented.


Major publisher makes ancient forest vow

Dear Blog: Today I Worked on My Book
By TANIA RALLI

When he has writer's block, John Battelle, author of the forthcoming book "The Search: The Inside Story of How Google and Its Rivals Changed Everything," keeps on writing. But not his book manuscript. Instead, he goes straight to his blog (battellemedia.com).

Mr. Battelle, a founder of Wired and The Industry Standard magazines, sometimes makes quick notes on the blog about a topic related to his book, and other times posts longer essays. "Writing for the blog is more like having a conversation," Mr. Battelle said.

For years, book authors have used the Internet to publicize their work and to keep in touch with readers. Several, like Mr. Battelle, are now experimenting with maintaining blogs while still in the act of writing their books.

"It is very satisfying to write something and get an immediate response to it," said Mr. Battelle, who calculated that last year he wrote 74,000 words for his book, and 125,000 words on his blog. "It is less satisfying to write a chapter and let it sit on the shelf for six months."

Instead of simply being a relief from writerly solitude, these blogs have turned into part of the process. Mr. Battelle said that he was surprised by the number of people who read his journal and offered feedback, correcting mistakes, making suggestions of people to interview or articles to read and contributing ideas that are finding their way into his finished manuscript.

"It has provided such a wealth of sources," he said. "The readers pointed me to things I might not have paid much attention to."

Authors' blogs also change the solitary mission of writing into something more closely resembling open-source software. Mistakes are corrected before they are eternalized in printed pages, and readers can take satisfaction that they contributed to a book's creation. The blogs can also confer some authority: Aside from drawing on the collective intelligence of its readers, Mr. Battelle's site has become a compendium of Google- and search-related issues.

Authors who have experimented with blogging in this way - and there are still only a handful - say they hope to create a sense of community around their work and to keep fans informed when a new book is percolating. The novelist Aaron Hamburger used his blog to write about research techniques he employed to set his coming book in Berlin (www.aaronhamburger.com). Poppy Z. Brite, another novelist, has written about her characters on her blog as though they have a life of their own, not just the one springing from her imagination (www.livejournal.com/users/docbrite).

Despite the encouragement some authors receive from their online readers, the steady stream of feedback can be paralyzing. For some, the open process invites criticism and self-doubt when there is research to be done.

David Weinberger, the author of "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," a nonfiction book about the Internet, posted his daily progress online while writing that book. But as he frequently rewrote each section, Mr. Weinberger found it was not the best way to capture readers' advice. For his new book - "Everything Is Miscellaneous," about how information is organized in daily life - he is posting chapters only when they are complete, rather than in fragments (www.hyperorg.com). "And then I will beg for comments," he said.

Chris Anderson, who is writing "The Long Tail," a nonfiction book to be published next year by Hyperion, freely posts his ideas on his blog to solicit responses (longtail.typepad.com). His book grew out of an influential article he wrote - by the same title - last year for Wired magazine, where he is editor in chief.

"The Long Tail" examines the shift from mass markets to niche markets. Taking a cue from Mr. Battelle, Mr. Anderson has made his blog a source for anything related to the topic, whether written by him or someone else. The blog charts new applications for Mr. Anderson's theory since the publication of his article, and helps him collect ideas for the book.

"The conversation is happening whether you like it or not," he said. "To hope that it will pause for 18 months is unrealistic."

By introducing new ideas through his blog and inviting responses, Mr. Anderson is operating on the notion that if you give something away, you will get more in return. "I very much want people to take the ideas and improve on them," he said.

The question for these authors is this: By feeding and engaging their readers' curiosity, are they destroying the market for the books that they, after all, are paid to write?

"Blogs are a way to listen in and find out what people find funny and respond to," said Marion Maneker, editorial director at HarperCollins's HarperBusiness unit, who said it was too early to determine whether blogs would affect sales.

Michael Cader, who is the editor of two industry publications, Publishers Marketplace and Publishers Lunch, said he believed that, based on the limited examples, authors could build a much bigger audience for their work through blogging. While there is no evidence yet that blogs affect books sales, Mr. Cader said, anything an author could do to create a readership was beneficial.

Since the publication of their book "Freakonomics," an economic lens onto human behavior, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have fielded questions about the book with their blog (www.freakonomics.com/blog.php), debated topics with readers (anything baseball-related strikes a nerve), and contemplated readers' suggestions (one reader suggested that fluoride in the water may be the root of all evil).

While saying that he was impressed by the depth and complexity of readers' responses, Mr. Levitt added that it was unlikely he would float his book ideas for mass consideration on the blog.

"The concern we have is about having our stuff sound fresh," he said. In addition to the conversation it engenders, the blog is mostly a receptacle for the ideas not spun into magazine articles.

Steven Johnson has used his blog (www.stevenberlinjohnson.com) to keep readers informed of his appearances and readings of "Everything Bad Is Good for You," his thesis on how pop culture strengthens, not erodes, intellect nonfiction. He has also rebutted his critics, chronicled his book tour, and responded to reader feedback. Mr. Johnson decided not to blog about the book while writing it, however,

Mr. Johnson said that many people who seek out the blog have read his earlier books and are interested in reading about, or commenting on, how his work has evolved. The readers get a behind-the-scenes look at the author's thoughts on the book's reception and other topics.

"There is only so much you can get out of a book signing," he said. "I feel like people don't really go to promotional book sites. They want the live feeling of the author who's out there fending off the critics and confessing his sins."



The New York Times > Technology > Dear Blog: Today I Worked on My Book

Your Language Needs You

Did you eat a balti before 1984 or have a mullet before 1994? And do you know how they got their names?

A forthcoming BBC TWO series invites you to hunt for words and help rewrite the Oxford English Dictionary. We are appealing to the nation to help solve some of the most intriguing recent word mysteries in the language.

The OED seeks to find the earliest verifiable usage of every single word in the English language. The 50 words on the appeal list all have a date next to them, corresponding to the earliest evidence the dictionary currently has for that word or phrase. Can you trump that?

To join the word hunt, you might find an earlier appearance of the word in a book or a magazine, in a movie script, a fanzine, or even in a private letter. The most important thing is that it can be dated.

Sometimes the OED can't tell how a word was invented - so if you can fill us in, so much the better. We've indicated next to these words that they are 'origin uncertain'. If you have a convincing theory, we'd like to hear from you. If you can prove you're right, you might help in rewriting the dictionary.

For a list of the words click here:
BBC - History - Programmes - Wordhunt

Watchdog savages Paris's literary lions

Jon Henley
Tuesday June 28, 2005
The Guardian

The Paris literary scene was shaken yesterday when the government's anti-corruption watchdog warned that France's most prestigious book prizes were wide open to corruption.
In its 2004 report, the SCPA, part of the justice ministry, said it was "difficult to distinguish between jury members, who are generally the authors of literary works, and the houses which publish their books. There is a risk that fair competition rules may be being broken."

The report, seen by Le Parisien newspaper, continued: "There is an evident risk of a conflict of interest. Moreover, the conditions in which the jury members are recruited or co-opted, often for life, are not exactly transparent, which makes them suspect as a matter of principle."
France's major literary awards such as the Prix Femina, the Prix Médicis and - most prestigious of all - the Prix Goncourt have long been accused of rigging their votes, taking it in turns to reward big publishers.

Of the four best-known names in French publishing, Gallimard has won the Goncourt 34 times, Grasset 16 times, Albin Michel 11 and Seuil five. Perhaps in response to mounting resentment, the prize went last year to a small and relatively recent house, Actes Sud.

In another advance, the Goncourt committee co-opted one of France's most popular and respected literary critics, Bernard Pivot, on to the jury: unlike the Pulitzer or the Booker, the jury composition of the major French contests, particularly the Goncourt, changes rarely if ever.

Nor is it uncommon to find that authors in competition for a prize are not only literary critics for well-known newspapers or magazines and commissioning editors for renowned publishing houses, but also members of the jury for rival awards.

"When you realise the millions of euros that a good Goncourt winner can generate for its publisher, you start to see the immorality of the whole thing," said a series editor for a small, independent publishing house outside Paris who asked not to be named.

"French publishing, and particularly the whole prize charade, is all about mutual back-scratching. It's scandalous really, and if it gets cleaned up that can only be a good thing."


Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Watchdog savages Paris's literary lions

How The Waste Land was done

Donald MacLeod
Tuesday June 21, 2005

Faced with that literary troublemaker TS Eliot, a York University academic called in the FBI and now claims to have cracked the case of how The Waste Land was written.
Lawrence Rainey, of the university's English department, spent two years travelling across Europe and the US to sort out the sequence in which Eliot wrote the poem.

A sheaf of rough drafts for the poem surfaced in 1971 and Prof Rainey compared them with the letters and other writing that Eliot was producing in the years before its publication in 1922 - a task calling for forensic as much as literary investigation. He examined more than 1,200 leaves of paper, including 638 pages of letters, Eliot had written between 1912 and 1922, visiting 22 international libraries and several private collections in his two-year journey.

FBI agents Bill Brown and David Attenberg gave the professor copies of the transparent templates the agency uses to identify makes of typewriters, and he used a micrometer to measure the thickness of every sheet of paper, as well as recording their height, width, watermarks, chainlines and other properties. He was able to date and to reconstruct the poem's composition.
Prof Rainey argues in Revisiting 'The Waste Land' that Eliot wrote the poem between January 1921, and January 1922, and that the poet did not follow a plan in its composition. Instead, Eliot improvised to stitch together more than 50 drafts.

"When The Waste Land was published, its defenders insisted that the poem was planned from the beginning and that it was a poem of extraordinary unity. Now that we can trace the processes and the choices that Eliot is making, the poem turns out to be something quite different," Prof Rainey said.

"You can see him making false starts and because he writes in tiny units of 13 lines at a stretch he is then left with the problem of how to stitch them together. You can see that he uses incredibly obvious choices to do that.

"The Waste Land was not a seamless whole, but something more radical. It is, at once, wild and unruly, violent and shocking and yet deeply compassionate," he added.


· Revisiting 'The Waste Land' by Lawrence Rainey is published by Yale University Press at £22.50

Guardian Unlimited Books | News | How The Waste Land was done

Connelly stays true to crime
By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY
Ask best-selling crime novelist Michael Connelly about his success, and the answer is deceptively simple.

"My stories," he says, "are very derivative of real life."

Indeed, his 15th novel, The Closers (Little, Brown, $26.95), is already a best seller (as high as No. 3 and currently No. 36 on USA TODAY's list) and is receiving rave reviews for its stark but detailed portrayal of life as an LAPD cold-case investigator.

Indeed, his 15th novel, The Closers (Little, Brown, $26.95), is already a best seller (as high as No. 3 and currently No. 36 on USA TODAY's list) and is receiving rave reviews for its stark but detailed portrayal of life as an LAPD cold-case investigator.

Back again is his protagonist, Harry Bosch, the hero in 11 Connelly novels. He has come out of retirement to join Open-Unsolved, a new unit that works to solve what TV's CSI, Law & Order and Cold Case refer to as cold cases — old, unsolved crimes that police still want to crack.

"The cold-case thing is the fad of the moment in entertainment because it's the fad of the moment in police work," says Connelly, 48. "Since the turn of the century, just about every police department has a cold-case unit. I just changed the name because it's so overused."

Advanced crime-solving techniques, though present, are not the meat of The Closers, Connelly says.

"There's a big difference between working fresh murders or fresh kills and working something that's really old. That's what really hooked me — that you could use this idea to take a look at the frayed social fabric that happens after a murder."

The reason Harry Bosch novels are so well received — multi-layered portrayals of cops and bad guys as well as colorful descriptions of life on the streets of Los Angeles — also helps explain why Connelly's next novel (The Lincoln Lawyer, due in October) will feature a never-before-used protagonist.

"My stand-alone novels are strategically placed to give my batteries a chance to recharge on Harry," Connelly says.

The Lincoln Lawyer is definitely different. It's a legal thriller, and for the first time, Connelly's main character is an attorney.

He got the idea about five years ago when he met a criminal lawyer who handled cases in sprawling Los Angeles County.

"He spent lots of time in his car. His car became his office," he says. "His driver was a client working off fees. The lawyer sat in the back and worked the phones and his computer. It seemed unique to me."

Connelly's eye for an interesting story dates back to his days as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times beginning in the late 1980s. His first novel, Black Echo (1992), won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers Association of America for best debut. All 15 of his books have been best sellers, and Bloodwork (1998) was made into a movie starring Clint Eastwood.

"The crime novel is becoming the social novel," Connelly says. "Many writers who are drawn to crime novels write fairly quickly, sometimes one book a year. ... So it seems to me that the crime writers and the mystery writers, however you want to call them, are the first to comment on what's happening in our world.

"Traditionally, this had been the role of the literary novel, and it still is. But those books kind of weigh in after the fact, whereas the crime novels come out right away.

"Yes, entertainment is important. ... But there's also an exploration of the world we're living in."

City of Angels, city of novels

Michael Connelly, of course, is not the only crime novelist using Los Angeles as his backdrop. Among other current novels set there:

Savage Garden by Denise Hamilton (Scribner, $22). Hamilton kicks off her fourth novel with fictional Los Angeles Times reporter Eve Diamond at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to see a theater production. When the leading lady goes missing, Diamond works the case for the Times but also for her own sake. She suspects her boyfriend, Silvio, may have known the missing Catarina way too well.

A Venom Beneath the Skin by Marcos M. Villatoro (Justin, Charles & Co., $24.95). Romilia Chacón, the heroine in Villatoro's third novel about this feisty Latina law enforcement officer, is now an FBI special agent in L.A. When her boyfriend is found brutally slain, the top suspect is Tekun Uman, a drug lord with whom Chacon has tangled before.

Damaged Goods by Roland S. Jefferson (Atria, $23). Jefferson tells a fast-paced and original story about a group of seasoned thieves who pull a nearly impossible heist. The crew is led by Alonzo Crane, a federal inmate known as "The Motion Picture Bank Robber" because of his penchant for using details from Hollywood movies to plot out his robberies (think Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair). Caution: Damaged Goods contains gratuitous violence, illicit sex, coarse language, and drug and alcohol abuse.



USATODAY.com - Connelly stays true to crime

For This Author, Writing Is Only the Beginning
By EDWARD WYATT

ETNA, N.H. - Slouched on a sofa in a faded T-shirt and jeans, a tousle of dyed-auburn hair trending gray at the roots, Janet Evanovich looks less like the chief of a budding media empire than a mother trying hard to be her daughter's best friend.

And there, next to her, is the daughter, Alexandra, whose dyed platinum-blond hair befits her stint as a freelance graphics designer for a heavy-metal band's fan site and her love for her red Ducati motorcycle, looking nothing like a corporate marketing guru.

Yet the two women are all of those things - best friends, metalheads and meticulous businesswomen. Together with Janet's son and husband, both named Peter, who handle everything from investments to the packing of signed books for shipment to stores, they make up the family enterprise known as Evanovich Inc.

And they have transformed Ms. Evanovich, 62, from a failing romance writer who once burned a box of rejection letters on her curb into a mini-industry whose success is beginning to emulate the sprawling domains of authorial heavyweights like James Patterson.

Last year, she sold an estimated one million books in hardcover and three million more paperbacks, earning more than $3 million in royalties from the paperbacks and several million more in advances and royalties on the hardcovers. The empire now includes two continuing mystery series: one featuring the sharp-elbowed bounty hunter Stephanie Plum, published by St. Martin's Press, whose latest installment, "Eleven on Top" went on sale June 21, and a second, published by HarperCollins, which began last fall with "Metro Girl."

While her success speaks to her tenacity and devotion to family, it owes as much to marketing prowess. When fans, impatient for her next novel, began asking her to recommend other writers like her, Ms. Evanovich hired one instead. Thus began a separate line of paperback romance-thrillers with Charlotte Hughes as co-author and St. Martin's as publisher. Four books in that series became best sellers.

And rather than risk having a previous publisher reissue her romance novels from more than a decade ago, Ms. Evanovich bought back the rights from Bantam, an imprint of Random House Inc., and resold them to HarperCollins, which has begun publishing them in a revised and updated format.

Ms. Evanovich acknowledges that her strategy is little different than it might be for selling toothpaste. "When you're trying to expand your business, it's about real estate in the stores," she said in an interview at her hilltop home in rural western New Hampshire, and more products in more categories mean more shelf space.

But while her relentless self-promotion has attracted more fans, it has also created some tensions. Michael Morrison, the president of HarperMorrow, the HarperCollins division that published "Metro Girl," said the interplay of multiple publishers and product lines is not ideal. "I'm a believer that a publisher and an author should have one primary relationship," he said. The sales of "Metro Girl" did not match Ms. Evanovich's previous best sellers, but Mr. Morrison said that over all he was pleased with her work.

"It's much easier to work with an author and orchestrate a publishing career if you have all of the books under one house," he said.

But Ms. Evanovich does not apologize for flooding the market with a new book every two to three months, nor for her calculated efforts to send her new novels straight to the top of the best-seller lists.

It has now become a rite of summer: each of the last five books in the numerical series featuring Stephanie Plum - from "Hot Six" in 2000 through "Ten Big Ones" last year - was No. 1 on The New York Times's hardcover best-seller list its first week on sale. Last fall, "Metro Girl" also had its debut at No. 1.

To put that feat in perspective, long-running series by James Patterson and Sue Grafton cannot match that current streak of immediate No. 1's.

Ms. Evanovich plots her first week of promotion to include book signings at big stores that report their sales to publications that publish best-seller lists. As in past years, the publication of the new Stephanie Plum novel will include a Stephanie Plum Daze festival in Trenton, the setting for the novels. Featuring live music, food, a character dress-up contest and historical-society tours of Trenton sites mentioned in the series, a festival on June 25 is expected to attract several thousand fans. Barnes & Noble will be there selling books.

She does not simply plan an event and expect people to show up, however. Evanovich Inc. constantly reminds its audience of a coming book, using its Internet site and a snail-mail newsletter, television commercials and radio spots. Ms. Evanovich oversees the design of book covers and the production of advertisements; she recently fired the agency that was devising commercials for "Eleven on Top" and enlisted her family and publisher to come up with a new pitch.

Behind the marketing machinations is Alexandra, 32, who writes the newsletter and illustrates both it and the Web site, www.evanovich.com. Until recently, she also managed the online store that sells hats, mugs and other paraphernalia, but its growth forced the family to outsource the job to a company in Florida.

The task of running Evanovich Inc. has grown so rapidly that last year the family decided it needed office space away from their hilltop home, where all four family members live at least some of the time.

Ms. Evanovich's son, Peter, 35, who manages the finances, oversaw the purchase of a $480,000 fixer-upper ranch-style house in Hanover near the Dartmouth campus for office space. Other recent family acquisitions include a $6.2 million waterside estate in Naples, Fla., and twin $1.6 million Boston condominiums - one for Mom, one for daughter - overlooking Boston Common.

Ms. Evanovich's husband of 40 years, the elder Peter, applies his Ph.D. in mathematics to the study of her contracts and the sales and distribution information generated by publishers and bookstores.

"I feel like I never would have been a success and gotten published without my family," Ms. Evanovich said. Throughout the years collecting rejection slips, and even as she began to earn a few thousand dollars per book for her early romances, "they never said, 'Why don't we go on vacation like other families?' " She added, "They just told me, 'You take your time and write.' "

The fans clearly love it. According to Nielsen BookScan, they bought nearly 300,000 copies of "Ten Big Ones" and 175,000 copies of "Metro Girl" from traditional book outlets. Ms. Evanovich's publishers say the numbers are far higher, perhaps twice as much, because a large portion her fans buy their books at Wal-Mart, Sam's Club and other stores that are not counted by BookScan. Clearly, her sales are big, though still well short of the levels reached by the likes of Nora Roberts, Mr. Patterson and John Grisham.

The critics have sometimes been less than enthusiastic. Writing in The New York Times, Janet Maslin said Ms. Evanovich's works were "the mystery-novel equivalent of comfort food." And more than once, her writing has been called formulaic.

Ms. Evanovich does not deny that; she simply wonders what is wrong with it.

"I'm a writer, but this is a business," she said. "You have to look at it in the way you would look at any business. You have to have honesty to the product. You have to meet consumer expectations. You give them value for their money and give them a product that they need. I don't see anything wrong with all these things. And I don't think it's a bad thing to meet consumers' expectations."



For This Author, Writing Is Only the Beginning - New York Times