TV-slave peeps, I’m agonizing over whether to a) watch the Gilmore Girls premiere tomorrow night (I will, punishment meet glutton) and b) whether to even attempt a GGGossip Circle post (I probably will, for any other gluttons out there). Oh, sadness. Why, ASP? Why? Sigh.
I plan some actual real content here this week, including posts on Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek (which I’m finding it hard to write about, but loved), David Levithan’s Wide Awake and Jennifer Egan’s The Keep. And in October, I’m going to profile at least one deliciously creepy read a week in honor of the season when everything dies and we dress up in costumes and get candy.
- The Book Standard rounds up a panel on the state of publishing, which cites a statistic that 7 percent of books published in 2004 sold more than 1,000 copies and accounted for 87 percent of total sales, with the remaining 93 percent of books selling fewer than 1,000 copies and making up 13 percent of total sales. Ouch. (Via Jeremy Lassen, King of Night Shade Books.)
- Book Nerd has Libba Bray’s Ode to Independent Booksellers.
- Rick Bowes has a shiny Web site to go along with his shiny story collection Streetcar Dreams and other midnight fancies from PS Publishing. Want.
- John Scalzi on hefty advances and books by bloggers.
- Happy Banned Books Week.
- How your brain knows whether I like you or not. (And vice versa.)
- So, do you think Heroes is worth watching for the bad bad baddity bad bad factor or is it just painfully bad?
The Book Standard thing raises lots of questions. Like do self-published books go into bookscan? It’s an important question if you’re looking at the publishing industry as a money-making industry. Most self-pubbers do not publish to make a buck. (Just as well really.)
But more fundamentally is it such a bad thing to only sell a thousand copies or less? There are books I’ve loved that are deeply obscure and are probably only going to be of interest to, and loved by, a small number of people. Are we saying those books shouldn’t be published?
Most published writers do not write to make a living. The majority of my friends are writers but only a handful of them write as their sole source of income. Yet all of them write because they don’t know how not to. And once they’ve written they (mostly) feel compelled to find an audience—no matter how small.
Is the stat cited really so terrible?
I guess I’m coming at that stat from a slightly different angle. I think it’s sad for READERS. Even if self-pub is part of the figure (which could only be those self-pubs with ISBNs, I’d wager), people are _buying_ an insanely slight range of books. Which is why so many writers don’t make a living at it. It doesn’t matter if they’re writing to make a profit or not — most writers are writing to find the largest audience they can. (Which can be a small audience, right?) That the overall bookbuying public consumes basically 7% of what’s published is troubling to me — I expect it would be even more troubling if we knew how much of that 7 is nonfiction.
Basically: As a fiction writer and reader, I wish more people were reading it.
Re: Gilmore Girls, sadly I must report that I’ve crossed over to House. I’ll check in here to hear if the new season of GG is any ggood. From the little promo ads the CW’s been putting out, it looks as though they’re emphasizing Lorelai&Rory as best pals again, which was always one of my favorite things about the series originally, so maybe that will work.
Good luck to you in your watching. Stay strong. Imbibe refreshments.
See that’s the beauty of DVR — I can watch BOTH! 🙂 Oh, fellow Hugh Laurie junkie. I just can’t analyze House to the same extent, or be as offended when it goes off the rails.
Yeah, Pär and I got pretty mad at Wilson this season, but that’s about our only complaint. They had me at “Hugh Laurie”. And then with Lisa Edelstein, they owned me body and soul.
I miss Sela Ward, though.
I love Sela Ward, but, oddly, didn’t love her on House. I just didn’t think they had the right chemistry together. Or something.