"Not So Much"

That's the subtitle of an article on Publishers Weekly estimating the number of copies sold of an Amazon best-seller doing a lot of math to estimate around the figures Amazon won't release. Curious... And as a millennial I love that they picked a book on "The Legend Of Zelda" Nintendo game.

"I also did the most rock star thing imaginable for a stay-at-home-dad/recipient-of-a-famous-cease-and-desist: I used the money to send my kid to daycare two days a week so I can have more time to write."

--Patrick Wensink reveals how much he made when his book BROKEN PIANO FOR PRESIDENT shot to #6 on the Amazon charts. Brave guy and I hope his transparency inspires others to do the same. (Also, he has a terrific website and has a collection of essays called EVERYTHING WAS GREAT UNTIL IT SUCKED.)

Google Reader, we miss you already

 

From "Hitler finds out Google Reader is shutting down" -- full video below.

Feels like only yesterday I wrapped all my RSS feeds in bubble wrap after Bloglines, itself kind of a miracle product for high-volume blog readers (ahem), shut down in 2010. To elaborate on ol' Adolf's point above, there is no way I could keep up with the blogs I want to read by following their Twitter or Facebook feeds. Facebook's algorithm, constantly shifting, often causes me to miss updates from blogs (and people) I care about, and the Twitter firehose could occupy my whole day chasing links. But to be honest, there are other RSS readers out there; it's not The End, just a change I don't want to make.

Well, anyway, for those of you who still read this through Google Reader and don't bookmark things, you can read my blog through Goodreads if you are a member there. It doesn't always like my formatting, and sometimes it truncates posts for reasons I don't understand, but if you're already stopping by there that could consolidate your web visitation. Do you want to be emailed posts? I could set up a widget for that. (Is email also over? OH NOOOO)

But seriously, I would have paid for Google Reader, that's how often I used it. I wish I had been given that option. Can we get a Kickstarter going for this? Send up the white smoke if you're in! (Oh look, she did some topical jokes today.)

 

Haul blog

• Lisa Cohen, ALL WE KNOW: THREE LIVES
• Frank Langella, DROPPED NAMES
• Joe Queenan, ONE FOR THE BOOKS (I think that's where this quotation comes from, hooray!)
• William Zinsser, THE WRITER WHO STAYED

And as a birthday present to myself,

• Sheryl Sandberg, LEAN IN 

which I hope to get to really soon so I can start opining on it from an informed place.

A Novel Approach: The reading cure?

Pop Culture Pirate pointed me to a new service in which, for $125, a librarian will consult with you for 45 minutes and then provide you with a reading list addressing your problems. "At a crossroads? Get insight from great literature on life's big moments" -- and for an extra $250 they will even mail you one book a month from that reading list. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that I would stumble across this on my birthday in a year when I would be facing massive changes & uncertainty in my own life. Just one of those things that happens that can't possibly be related!

What I would love to see from this website is a list of testimonials from satisfied customers affirming that the choices made for them were marvelously helpful and significantly obscure, enough that they wouldn't come across those books otherwise. Since the fun is in the hunt to some extent for me, they have to be way-out-there, or if only out-there, books I need a nudge on in order to get going. To take an extreme example, I don't want to open it up and see that I have to read ANGELS AND DEMONS again. (If it says I have to go to Rome again though, I will start packing my bags yesterday. No wait, I will just wear what I have on and see you at the airport. Bye!)

The Unknown Citizen

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

--W.H. Auden

Good advice

Today's Google Doodle was a fitting tribute now that we more or less all carry HITCHHIKER'S GUIDES around with us.

Tournament of Books '13: The UK takes it... judging by the covers

The Millions compares the book covers of several competitors in this year's tournament from US to UK designs. THE ROUND HOUSE aside, why are UK covers so impressive? (For jingoistic glee, however, note the Damian Lewis blurb on THE YELLOW BIRDS UK edition. "I'm not in the military, but I play one on TV...")

Let's all write dystopias and quit our jobs

Once a self-published serial writer on Amazon, Hugh Howey has engineered a rare print-only deal to bring his postapocalyptic drama WOOL to stores. About his early days, from the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Howey kept trying. He got a 30-hour-a-week job at a university bookstore that paid only $10 an hour but gave him some flexibility. He got up at two or three in the morning to write, and wrote through his lunch hour and after dinner. He designed his own cover art, enlisting his wife and sister to pose in photos. He would often jolt up in bed in the middle of the night to scribble down ideas.

"It was almost a compulsion for him," says Ms. Lyda. Ms. Lyda said she pleaded with him to leave his pen open on his nightstand, because the clicking noise of his pen kept waking her up.
"Wool" started as a short story that Mr. Howey dashed off in three weeks. He posted it on Amazon for 99 cents in July 2011. Within three months, the story had sold 1,000 copies. Mr. Howey was stunned.
"I told my wife, 'Baby, we're going to be able to pay a couple of bills off this short story,' " he said.
Readers begged for a sequel, and in November, Mr. Howey released another installment. He sold more than 3,000 copies that month. The next month, he released two more installments and sold nearly 10,000 copies total. In January, he released the final installment, for $2.99, and published all five as a single volume, for $5.99. Collectively, he sold 23,000 copies of all the editions that month. "Wool" shot up Amazon's science-fiction best-seller list. Mr. Howey quit his job.

Jonathan Karp of Simon & Schuster described it as an "unusual circumstance" to separate the print and e-book rights in the mid-six-figure deal, which is code for "Rats! How did he get all that leverage?!"

It's a parody of all acknowledgement sections, but Noreen Malone's closer on her article about Sheryl Sandberg's LEAN IN is masterful:

This piece wouldn’t have been possible without the skillful editing of Chloe Schama or the helpful brainstorming of my colleagues Timothy Noah, Cameron Abadi, Marc Tracy, Judith Shulevitz, and Ben Crair. Thanks, too, to Sam Tanenhaus, Pamela Paul, Lorin Stein, and Alex Star for their thoughtful comments on the topic. Thanks to Chris Hughes and Frank Foer for hiring me, my mother for birthing me, Al Gore for inventing the Internet, and the Germans and the Romans for the building blocks of the English language. I only wish my severely under-cared-for jade plant could have survived to see its publication—thank you to it, as well, for the sacrifice in service of this larger project of journalism. And of course I could not fail to thank Martha Stewart, who I tweet at with some regularity and who continues to be my inspiration as a woman who doesn’t let rules, pursuant to the federal penal code or otherwise, get in the way of her tastefully cruel mien. Any errors herein are a copy editor’s or an intern’s, and anyone I have forgotten to mention, it is because I secretly hate them. Thanks to Michelle Obama for EVERYTHING!!!

I have LEAN IN preordered for professional business lady reasons, but am kind of impressed at Sandberg's ability to press people she knows into service.

But I would also like to thank Michelle Obama "for EVERYTHING!!!"

 

Only one can survive

and it was THE HUNGER GAMES, fittingly, that came out on top as the New York Public Library's most checked out book of 2012. Among adult titles Walter Isaacson's STEVE JOBS biography took the top spot, and the author-studded "Midnight in Paris" (clipped for one of the best YouTube videos ever) was the most checked out DVD. 

ToB '13: WHERE'D YOU GO, BERNADETTE?

Bernadette is an unhappy stay-at-home mom in Seattle whose husband is a big shot at Microsoft. Facing the prospect of a trip to Antarctica with which she had bribed her daughter, Bee, to get better grades, Bernadette tries to find a way out of it while getting involved in a major PTA skirmish and feeling trapped in rainy, foggy Washington. If only she could just... vanish...

WHERE'D YOU GO, BERNADETTE is formatted as a collection of documents related to Bernadette (emails, transcripts of phone calls, official school news) and compiled by her daughter Bee. I loved this epistolary mashup but am curious to see how it will be transferred in the forthcoming adaptation. With regard to the plot, this book is like "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang": Realistic with dashes of whimsy until it drives into the ocean and enters an absurd world.

I say that with love, mostly. I tore through this book; I found it funny and playful with a really dark, juicy underside. The resolution satisfied me -- at first, but the further I got away from it I began to take it apart in my head. This surprised me, because despite the outward quirks of Bernadette, I don't think she's that much of an outlier, until the end until she makes a decision to [redacted for spoilers] which doesn't seem plausible. I didn't hate the ending, but am still tempted to write my own that conforms more to what I think Bernadette wanted.

(I know -- lately, I've apparently joined the Plausibility Police when I read fiction. What do I know about the decision she made?! Who made me a police officer? But if I can't accept that, that's still a problem.)

One of the early revelations about Bernadette is related to her old career, which she effectively left behind in Los Angeles when she moved and never reassumed. To me, this was an interesting take on what one might call the "mommy wars" or "opt-out" literature; part of Bernadette's frustration with the petty PTA is that she just seems bored and underutilized in her own life. Against her we can place the counterpart voice of a female admin who works with Elgin and sends her child to school with Bee, who at times seems almost like the villain of this piece, but is no happier in her own juggle of professional and familial responsibilities. It was this Bernadette I identified with, not the risk-taker of the final chapters.

February Unbookening

This month I totally PR'd in library books returned unread (7!) and library fines racked up (I haven't even looked):

Checked out from library: 12
Bought: 2 (both career-related)
Received: 5
Borrowed: 3
Got to review: 2
24 in

Returned to library: 11
Donated: 7
Returned (personal): 4
22 out 

My heart wasn't much in it this month but I foresee another major purge coming soon.

It's the new pig Latin

The pigeons appeared in the fall. They swarmed Twitter and Facebook. They had their own hashtag, "#geonpi," which was "pigeon" rendered in verlan, the French slang that splits a word in half and inverts the parts. "Pigeon" connoted a sucker or a chump.

This is but one of a thousand mind-boggling details in this New Yorker story about Gerard Depardieu versus French tax reform, but my fellow Americans, we need this speaking convention. Who's with me?!

ToB '13: My Picks

Despite starting earlier I had an even shabbier showing at finishing this year's Tournament of Books slate in time for "competition," starting on Monday. Yet we plunge madly forward into the uncertain future.

The bracket this year was so crazy and stylish I decided to input all my answers for "Will Win" and "Should Win," Oscar style. On the "Should Win" bracket I masked out all the titles I didn't get to read in time (hint, there are a lot), and half of THE ROUND HOUSE because I haven't finished it yet but I'm sucked in now.

Also, apparently spell check doesn't think Fobbit is a word. How rude.

Brackets found here designed by Liz Meyer, who I would definitely hire for something based on this if I had the capacity to do so.