Lots of good book stuff happening the past couple of days:

• Most of you have probably heard by now that Amazon’s releasing a new big-screen Kindle for newspapers, and that they’re working closely with a select group of dailies and news organizations. For those of you who haven’t, see: the New York Times, editorsweblog.org.
• Busy week for Amazon: they’ve also acquired the Stanza ebook reader for the iPhone. I find it very interesting that more and more publishers are releasing books in print and for Stanza at the same time. And now Amazon’s got their grubby paws on this small company, which probably means that a) Stanza is going to become huge; b) the Kindle app is going to become huge. Stanza uses the ePub ebook format. Watch that: it may well be the ebook format of the future.
• Locus Novus is a superb multimedia fiction site. I agree with Lee - go read (watch?) Hotel Rot and wait for the message in the last slide … fantastic.
• Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, has a surprisingly good video over at TED on creativity. QFT: ‘to be fair, chemical engineers, as a group, haven’t earned a reputation over the years for being alcoholic manic depressives … and we writers do.’
• Talent is overrated. Practice isn’t.
• Steven Johnson on the Wall Street Journal: how the ebook will change the way we read and write (watch out for the writing for Google section; also, I call bullshit on the Paying Per Chapter section)
• Here’s a handy link to the Economist Style Guide. Pretty useful, regardless of what kind of writing you do.

I’ve already posted this to WFG’s forums, but here it is for those of you who’ve missed it: Writer’s Digest has a Self Published Competition going on. The grand prize is a sweet $3000 in cash, and a sweeter endorsement for reviews of the winning self-published book at 10 major reviewing establishments (ie: The New York Times, The Washington Post). And there are 10 first place winners, of $1000 each, with a collection of publishing industry-related presents like magazine subscriptions, ebooks, etc. Only one catch: each submission costs you $100, and I do suspect that it’s a crudely designed (and profit-making) filter for badly written self-published books. Still, for 10 reviews in 10 major newspapers … things like that, when they happen, usually mean a publishing deal and some form of mainstream book career further down the road. A $100 fee seems quite reasonable for a shot at stardom …

Other things to look at: 

• John Siracusa explores the past, present and future of ebooks and digital reading in what is probably the definitive op piece on the subject. Almost everything that can be said about ebooks is said in that essay. Read it.
• Here’s a curiosity: a 1983 (!) essay from the Virginia Quaterly Review predicting, amongst other things,  Wikipedia, e-book readers and political blogs. 
• Nicholas Carr writes about the current newspaper industry and makes some startling observations of how newspapers dying and consolidating is a good thing for the publishers. 
• Good writing: Granta’s archives’s got this essay by A.L. Kennedy on her grandfather and the mechanics of boxing, and it’s one of the most beautiful, mint-perfect pieces of fine writing I’ve read in quite a bit. I finished it with a lump in my throat.
• Boing Boing on what software to best use for writing a book.

And I guess I’ll close with this bookstore ad I found through Sharon:Wonder how long they took to do that!

Alan Giles, blogging for The Bookseller, yesterday wrote an article comparing Radiohead’s album experiment to the book industry. He points out:

But here’s the most surprising conclusion from “In Rainbows”; despite an explicit invitation by the band to legally download the album for free, huge numbers chose to do so illegally. Research by Will Page, chief economist of copyright organisation MCPS-PRS Alliance, and Eric Garland, c.e.o. of online media researcher Big Champagne, reported 400,000 such “torrents” in the first day, and 2.3 million over the first 25 days. Yet by any standards the album has been a huge commercial success. Page and Garland conclude that “torrents and legal downloads are complements, not competitors”.

He comes to an interesting close when he talks about the music industry’s attitude towards piracy in the 1980s:

.. the (then) record industry publicly argued that “home taping is killing music”, while recognising that hard-up students who had developed a love of music through illegally copying might become core buyers in later life.

It is worth pointing out here that piracy doesn’t affect the publishing industry as much as it does the music one. I’d be more worried about the lack of offline readers and the lower margins the publishing industry faces today than the possibility of copyright infringement. Though, on the other hand, I admit to downloading a copy of Breaking Dawn recently (ehheh!) after finding out that the Malaysian release was delayed for a week. The difference here being that I’d buy the book the instant it hit local bookstores - owning a paper copy is priceless and forever, and a lot more meaningful to me than a .lit file. (Special thanks to Sharon of Bibliobibuli for highlighting this article)

Other links worth checking out:

• Some of my predictions regarding Pages Unbound’s close have come true: discussions about a replacement/clone site have sprung up in the PU forums. Interested writers contact Rose here.
• The New York Times on why we capitalize our ‘I’s.
• A long transcript answering the question ‘How Is the Internet Changing Literary Style?‘
• Just found out about Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth Of Networks. Benkler explores the reality of making money through user generated content, though Nicholas Carr has a wager going on that the only reason volunteers still exist is because there isn’t really any way to make money off them. The book is available for free here.
• Daniel Hall writes in The Economist about how technology is fragmenting the music industry, and - like many others - goes on to throw the gauntlet in the book industry’s direction.

If it seems that more and more people are seeing the parallels between both industries, then it is because they are. The Internet has disrupted many things for many people and the general situation we’re seeing on the ground now is mass confusion. Which equals opportunity. Exciting times, this.

PS: Alexandra Erin’s not gotten back to me on the future of Pages Unbound, so I’m in the dark as to what her descicions are. Somebody help, please?

I love Sharon Bakar. Just the other day I found two articles via her blog (Bibliobibuli) entitled ‘The Sharp Rise (And Quick Fall) Of The Blogger’s Books.’ It is the ugly sound of publishers waking up to reality: blogger popularity will not translate to book sales. A particularly telling sentence:

… “built-in” audience or not, it all comes down to content. “A good writer is a good writer,” says Leitch. “Dana Vachon’s book (Mergers & Acquisitions), which was based on his blog - the key to that, it wasn’t about a guy that blogged. He’s a real writer. I don’t think anyone picks up the book and is like, ‘Hey, where are the links?’”

Wonderful stuff.

On a partially related front: does writing really matter? Caleb Crain writes in the New Yorker that reading may very well die out: instead, people will communicate through more visual mediums. The image that hit me was Socrates laughing away in his grave - he believed writing to be inferior to conversation.

A paragraph that made me cringe:

… but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.”

In which case you and I will be very rare people indeed.

• Just discovered Xlibris: a ’strategic partner of Random House Ventures’. Much like Lulu, only … smaller, and connected to a traditional publishing house at that.
• Anne Wayman tells us how Writers can stop Global Warming.
• [Blook]: Death On The Beach. Blooked on a ‘displaced Blackberry’, and currently on Chapter 4.
• [Blook]: I have read half of the first arc of Omen of Chaos, and … well. Carlos is prolific and enthusiastic, and really dedicated to the story, but OoC is not something you’ll find in a bookstore anytime soon. I’m keen to see what he writes next, though: someone who writes so much can only get better and better at it.

A little shoutout here: Aaron Dunlap has finished Mind+Body … and he’s looking for a good agent to help him get the blook published. In the meantime he’s going to run it through a proofreader and put it up on Lulu. Any of you know a good lit agent to recommend go email him here.

On with the usual Bookmarked! fare:

Article 1. This is a (relatively) old Time.com article on blooks, posted in the days leading up to the Blooker prize announcement. It’s different because the article’s focus is on Blurb, instead of the usual Lulu exultations.

For creative types, on-demand printing is a cost-effective way to reach an audience, says Jeff Hayes, chief analyst at InfoTrends. Self-publishers have long served this purpose, Hayes adds, but Blurb reaches well beyond frustrated novelists. “It speaks to this long-tail economy,” Hayes says. “If you’re the local painter or you make jewelry, how do reach those who are interested in what you do? The key is to make it easier for the individual publisher and the interested reader to connect.”

It is essentially about Michelle Kaufmann, who used Blurb to publish Prefab Green, a book featuring her architectural firm’s work - ‘100 glossy pages of text, color photos and detailed floor plans.’

Article 2. Alright, so this isn’t an article. But I can’t help but share it: The Book Inscriptions Project is a site that posts up (you guessed it) book inscriptions! Or rather the little messages people scribble in the margins of books, especially when the book is a gift. What they do (in their own words):

We collect personal messages written in ink (or pen or marker or crayon or grape jelly) inside books. Pictures count. So do poems. So do notes on paper found in a book. The more heartfelt the better.

It’s a lot like Postsecret, but - thankfully - not as vulgar.

Article 3. How long should your story be? How many words in a novel? A novella? Short story? Read on to see what editors expect.

Blooks

1. In Search Of Adam is something I’d like to get my hands on … it is a blook (I’m pretty sure it is) but since it’s published by The Friday Project I don’t think I can get it in a brick and mortar bookstore over here. I can but hope - you never know if it gets bought over by Bloomsbury or Harper Collins or something. Go check it out here.

2. The City Desk is a really weird fiction blog. No narrative, no story … just an exploration of a (non-existent) city - its businesses and events and streets.

“After browsing for a while, I’m still not sure what it is, but I like it.” - Internet user named “Ickster,” at Metafilter

I think that pretty much sums it up.

3. My friend Ming has started a blook … a day by day journey to find inspiration as an artist. As of press time he’s at Day 6, and boy does he do beautiful pieces.

I’m hoping he acheives what he’s looking for - because a lot of what he writes about inspiration is true for writers too …

Inspiration? I don’t pretend to know what that is. But I think it is breathing in the moment in all it’s richness, with all our senses, filling our beings with love, and beauty, and a silent wisdom.

A picture may well be worth a hundred words, but both are capable of evoking complex emotions in their own right. And come to think of it … a novel would be worth 1100 pictures … both an explosion of colours and thoughts and feelings.

Exhibition, anyone?

This has been a rather slow week for me, relatively speaking. I’ve been looking up a few articles and brooding over them - as well as a rather hilarious look at Penguin group’s attempt at a Wiki novel. So here’s the Bookmarked! post for April 5th:

I’ll start off with a mention of Mugglenet’s April Fools stunt - apparently each of the members posted up a ‘preview’ of Harry Potters and the Deathly Hallows - and the results were spectacularly hilarious:

“I always had an inkling that there was more to Hermione; her immediate knack with magic, and her irregular mood swings towards supposed ‘friends,’ Harry and Ron. I should have known she’d switch to the Dark side eventually. I just wish she hadn’t killed the whole of Ravenclaw in the process - I suppose it was just her annoyance at not being sorted there initially.” -Ciaran

“I couldn’t believe Snape was the long lost love child of Aberforth and that goat. It explains so much, including Severus’ appearance. And we now know why he told Harry to never call him a ‘cow’-ard, because he was in fact part goat.” -Micah

“I knew it! I knew it! When the Muggles came and totally obliterated everyone at the final battle, I was totally ready for it. Although, I admit killing every major character in the series was going a bit overboard, especially when Neville got hit by that bus after all was said and done. I didn’t know JKR had it in her!” -Tom

Quite a few of my friends actually did believe it, and they were reduced to pale-faced ghastly zombies for a day, wailing “How could they?!”

Those Mugglenet writers better run for cover for at least a full year. Heh.

On a more serious note, there’s been much talk lately of the recent Eyetrack study conducted by Poynter’s Institute. The findings state - get this - that online readers actually read 77% of an online (news) story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.

News has always been suited for online reading, being that it is short, easy to digest and (usually) doesn’t require much thinking. The fact that the online world is threatening traditional newspapers and magazines isn’t the least bit surprising to me. But what I do find surprising is that readers actually complete more of a story on the internet rather than off it. What about the various distractions? The email and the Myspace pages and the RSS news feeds?

This is one myth that we’ll hear more about, sooner or later.

Blooks

A Story Blook has actually been around for quite some time. The author’s recently gotten back from a hiatus and I’d say this is a perfect time to head over and to check it out - it’s grown to have quite a few short stories, all twisted to some extent.

There has been a explosion of all things marked with the word ‘blook’ right after the wake of the 2007 Blooker Prize shortlist announcement. My inbox is being flooded, and I’m picking through the debris to find links of some value, which i would not have otherwise found. Let’s take a look:

The first is an article called Narrative Expectations from a blog called Tales From The Reading Room. Alright, it may have nothing to do with blooks or writing on the web, but the examples given are so enjoyable it took me a good 3 seconds to stop chuckling.

The next is what John Baker calls essential reading for anyone who seriously wants to write fiction. It’s the full text of an essay by Susan Sontag about our responsibilities as a writer, the nuances of the job, and the place of the novel (and the novelist) in a world of ’spurious cultural geography’.

On the one hand, we have, through translation and through recycling in the media, the possibility of a greater and greater diffusion of our work. On the other hand, the ideology behind these unprecedented opportunities for diffusion, for translation - the ideology now dominant in what passes for culture in modern societies - is designed to render obsolete the novelist’s prophetic and critical, even subversive, task, and that is to deepen and sometimes, as needed, to oppose the common understandings of our fate.

Long live the novelist’s task.

Read it here.

Blooks

I’ve discovered 3 blooks this week - the problem is that most of the time they’re not called blooks, but rather ‘blogged novels’ or ‘novel in blog form’. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that there is general antithesis to the word ‘blook’? Hmm. Anyway, here they are:

Death Sucks, a blook completed October last year (mistake corrected, thanks Ray), about a vampire kitty cat. The fonts are too small for comfortable on screen reading, but what got me started was the author’s commentary and excerpt at his blog Flogging The Quill: where he writes that blooking is not for the faint of plot .

Another fantasy novel in blog form: The Legacy of Tsazcuth, nevermind the weird name. Very readable fonts, and the first episode grips you from the get go. I’m planning on finishing it and then posting a review here - the entire blog seems to be receiving good feedback. And I’m eager to see why.

The third blook for this week is Stonyfields, a book Gloria Hildebrandt completed offline but couldn’t get published. She left me a comment alerting me to the possibility of blooking as a way to get completed novels that aren’t being read out there. In return, I’ll read her novel. It’s the least I can do.

I’ll close with an article from Kateblogs. It’s called It’s a Long and Winding Road, and she writes about how blooking isn’t a shortcut to getting published.

Lets face it, rejection hurts. Whether it is personal or professional. No one wants to be turned away, and while initially it may be easy enough to shrug off any feelings of hurt or disappointment, in time it can become frustrating, and disheartening.

A writer and blogger I read regularly is in this very situation. Despite being talented and determined he remains unpublished. I can fully understand why he feels dejected. Not only is he unable to earn a living doing something he loves, there is also the personal aspect. Writing comes from within, we leave part of ourselves on the page intermingled with the words. When those words are rejected, it can feel personal. Added to which is that fact that talent is not necessarily enough. Luck plays a big part, and sadly, so does knowing the right people.

… don’t worry about rejection generally, collect your rejection letters with pride. I know it’s hard to do that, but treat them as a joke, and think that you are one step nearer the day when a letter comes through the door saying YES!

Quite an optimistic look on writing, a shot of which is something we all can do with.