From The Telegraph:

Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.

Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.

The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

. . . .

“Hello agent John, it’s client Dan,” commented the pecunious scribbler. “I’m worried about new book Inferno. I think critics are going to say it’s badly written.”

The voice at the other end of the line gave a sigh, like a mighty oak toppling into a great river, or something else that didn’t sound like a sigh if you gave it a moment’s thought. “Who cares what the stupid critics say?” advised the literary agent. “They’re just snobs. You have millions of fans.”

That’s true, mused the accomplished composer of thrillers that combined religion, high culture and conspiracy theories. His books were read by everyone from renowned politician President Obama to renowned musician Britney Spears. It was said that a copy of The Da Vinci Codehad even found its way into the hands of renowned monarch the Queen. He was grateful for his good fortune, and gave thanks every night in his prayers to renowned deity God.

“Think of all the money you’ve made,” recommended the literary agent. That was true too. The thriving ink-slinger’s wealth had allowed him to indulge his passion for great art. Among his proudest purchases were a specially commissioned landscape by acclaimed painter Vincent van Gogh and a signed first edition by revered scriptwriter William Shakespeare.

Link to the rest at The Telegraph and thanks to Robert for the tip.

From The Huffington Post:

I don’t owe you your dream career.

I hope that writers make careers of writing. I hope that indie bookshop owners make careers of owning and working in indie bookshops. I hope that these things are lucrative and happiness-making. But being a reader does not obligate me to do anything other than read books. As a reader, I will accept responsibility to do one thing:

1. I won’t ever steal books, digital or otherwise. Not ever.

But I won’t (a) not use the library, (b) not buy used books, (c) not borrow books from friends. If I choose to do any of those things, I don’t (a) owe a tweet, (b) owe a blog review, (c) owe a word of mouth review. I am not betraying bookish culture if I (a) buy from Amazon or Chapters or Barnes and Noble, (b) wait to buy the paperback, (c) don’t buy at all. None of the above things are unethical or amoral or indicative of my deep failings as a reader or blogger or member of the bookish community.

Link to the rest at The Huffington Post and thanks to Barb for the tip.

Barb asks:

What is this new and hostile attitude readers have to writers?

That’s what I say about the mean girls site.  They love books, they hate authors.

PG thinks the article reflects a bit of fatigue at being badgered about making a blog post touting a book, sending a tweet doing the same, etc.

PG appreciates tips about possible posts for The Passive Voice (they make the job of finding interesting information much easier), but uses only some of them.

On occasion, after he receives a tip involving something the tipster has written and thanks the person who submitted it, he receives a follow-up email which says something like, “When are you going to blog about it?”

Being married to long-time author who has gone indie, PG is very familiar with the work, frustration, anxiety, etc., involved with promoting a new book. He regularly participates in some of that work.

However, the lesson PG takes from the HuffPo article is that authors should pay attention to the line between informing and demanding in their promotional efforts. Most do, but for someone with the media prominence of the HuffPo author, the few that don’t end up in a more prominent role than they deserve.

From Tobias Buckell:

I think there are two dangers from repeatedly reviewing (or reading critically) a lot of books. And, as I said, it’s a danger that we writers also face (heck, struggle with, as well).

1) When you get to a point where you’ve read an amazing number of books, you change. You’ve read so much that what may seem new or interesting to most (and even to the writer of the book you’re reading) is just a variation to you. Your expectations regarding the work change.

Due to subjectivity being what it is, many writers can mistake what’s happening and view it as the books getting worse, not their own aesthetic changing. Two things can happen. One, despair at what they perceive is the dying of quality. You see this a lot with people who hit a certain number of books read: they begin to rail against the dreadfulness of everything. It can lead to bitterness, cynicism, and outright hatred of something they previously loved.

. . . .

2) If you’re able to either unconsciously or consciously navigate the above, what you’re left with isn’t a raw, initial passion for reviewing what you love, but a more craftman’s-like examination of the book for an audience you may no longer really be a part of, but can remember being a part of. It’s easy to slip into this vein, by will or luck, because it does allow you to keep reading a ton while reporting back on the basics of what you read.

What those reviews are basically covering is “If you like X sort of thing, this hits X okay, with some additional Y and Z, if you also are into that.” Do they feel sucked dry of a bit of the reviewer’s authorial voice? Yeah, probably, because the reviewer has had to step back out of necessity in order to report back to a larger audience.

. . . .

Over time, I’ve been able to move back into a place where I can focus on what works about a book, and focus less on what doesn’t. Author C.C. Finlay has a quote he uses that runs something like: “A novel doesn’t excite readers because you took all the bad stuff out of it, it excites them because of all the good stuff that’s in it, regardless of the bad.”

At a workshop not too many years ago a newer writer began to condemn a best selling novel, pointing out all its flaws and jagged edges. I listened for a long time, nodding.

“All those things are true,” I said. And gave him the C.C. Finlay quote. “But until you learn what the good parts were that excited the reader, you’re always going to be bitterly upset about what is wrong with that bestseller. Learn to spot what worked in that book, and you’ll be able to move forward. And you’ll be a lot less upset all the time as well.”

Link to the rest at Tobias Buckell

From Salon:

In 2001 when my first novel, “Slab Rat,” was published and I was important for about eight weeks.

. . . .

[L]ast year, my third novel, Pocket Kings was published. As best as I can remember, it did not receive one negative review. There were some flat-out raves, too. TheWashington Post loved it and it was an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times Book Review.This was the first time that the Times had liked a book of mine. They cold-bloodedly butchered the first and fatally wounded the second.

“Pocket Kings” got positive reviews, but the problem is it just didn’t get too many of them. As far as I know, only one newspaper west of the Pecos (the Dallas Morning News), reviewed it. Newspapers don’t cover books anymore, of course. And then there’s the lack of a readership on my part, I’m just not that prominent, etc.

. . . .

“Pocket Kings” took so long to actually get published that before it finally hit the stores and Amazon, I’d already written another novel, called “West of Babylon,” and was ready to shop it around. My agent and I had decided, however, to wait and send out the newer book in the wake of “Pocket Kings.” Our hope was that “Pocket Kings” would get positive reviews and that publishers would then chomp at the bit for West of Babylon.

But it didn’t work out that way. Editors passed on “West of Babylon.” It got some great, encouraging rejections but still, nobody wanted it. (I would rather have a discouraging acceptance than an encouraging rejection.)

. . . .

My agent — my real agent — and I agreed that “West of Babylon” was too good to just forget about. I’ve written many books but only three have gotten published — the others are either somewhere under my bed or somewhere on my hard drive. “West of Babylon,” I felt, did not deserve that fate. So we decided I should self-publish the book in electronic book format only. I would be publisher, editor, publicist, regional sales manager, mail room guy and everything else. (My wife designed the cover in return for a $50 gift card to the Gap.)

I can tell you that self-publishing is not fun.

As I write these words, I am now in my seventh week of attempting to spread the word about “West of Babylon.” I have sent emails to many newspapers, from the Boston Globe down to the Miami Herald across to the San Francisco … well, to just about everywhere. I’ve sent emails to newspapers and magazines in England, too, and to websites and book blogs.

. . . .

Sometimes I get replies. Overwhelmingly I do not.

When I hit the send button, I assume that nothing will come of it.

. . . .

By this time, I had already sent email to several National Public Radio shows (“Fresh Air,” “Weekend Edition,” etc.) trying to spread the word, and hadn’t gotten any return email from them. (NPR stands for, I now realize, No Possible Reply. They are dead to me now, and I only wish I was a frequent, generous donor so that way I could now stop donating to them.)

. . . .

I’ve sent two emails to the editor of the New York Times Book Review and have not gotten a return email.

. . . .

Now, I happen to know a few people at magazines and newspapers; I’ve had novels published and I have an agent. But what is this experience like for Jane and John Q. Self-Publishing Author way out there in South Podunk, who don’t know anybody at all and who have zero connections? My heart goes out to them.

Link to the rest at Salon and thanks to Tom for the tip.

From New York magazine:

[From an interview with Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books]

From books to texts to video games. What comes next?
The other night, I sat next to a woman who said, well, my children now only send Instagrams.

Instagrams! I don’t even know what those are.
You keep in touch with your friends by sending them one picture after another, from your phone.

Don’t you find this development rather worrying?
Years ago my friend John Gross did many anthologies for the Oxford publishing company—the Oxford Book of Essays, the Oxford Book of Aphorisms, and so on. Now I might imagine an Oxford Book of Tweets! That is to say, witty, aphoristic, almost Oscar Wildean remarks, drawn from the millions and millions of tweets. Or from comments that follow on blogs. But I doubt it will ever be done. A great many tweets and follow-on comments are really rather lame or cheap wisecracks, in which you feel behind the tweet the compulsion, simply, to … tweet. To get in on it.

To tweet or not to tweet. And not to tweet is to be left behind.
And that raises a question: What is this? What are the kinds of prose, and the kinds of thinking, that result from the imposition of the tweet form and other such brief reactions to extremely complex realities? My feeling is that there are millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs, and that they are not getting and will not get the critical attention that prose anywhere should have unless we find a new form of criticism.

If a novel is published, we have a novel review. If poetry is produced, if a play or a movie or a TV show is produced, there are the forms of criticism we know. With the new social media, with much of the content of the Internet, there are very few if any critical forms that are appropriate. They are thought to be somewhere partially in a private world. Facebook is a medium in which privacy is, or at least is thought to be, in some way crucial. The premise, at least, is that of belonging to a family, a circle of friends. And there’s another premise, that any voice should have its moment. And so there seems a resistance to intrusive criticism.

But this means that billions of words go without the faintest sign of assessment. And yet, if one cares about language, if one cares about the sensibility in which language is expressed, and if one cares about the values that underlie our use of language, such as affection, privacy, honesty, cogency, clarity—then these media, it would seem to me, should qualify as the subject of criticism. We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words, an ocean growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to bear on it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence.

. . . .

Which brings us to books themselves: Are you concerned about their future?
In one way or another, if you include e-books and self-published books, more books are being published than ever. Most people don’t seem to understand that. And there is no falling off, in my view, of very serious books. A major problem for us remains, as I see it, the flood of books that do require consideration for review. That should be reviewed. We’re constantly struggling to master the flood. If you look over the lists of just the university-press publishers, you’ll find literally hundreds of books worthy of review.

Link to the rest at New York and thanks to Jef for the tip.

From The Wall Street Journal:

What is it about the book “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates” that brings out the wiseguy in people?

Rand Corp.’s 600-page paperback, which delivers exactly what it promises, sells for $64.60 on Amazon.com. Yet 400 people have submitted online Amazon reviews, most of them mocking the 60-year-old reference book for mathematicians, pollsters and lottery administrators.

“Almost perfect,” said one reviewer. “But with so many terrific random digits, it’s a shame they didn’t sort them, to make it easier to find the one you’re looking for.”

Five stars from this commenter: “[T]he first thing I thought to myself after reading chapter one was, ‘Look out, Harry Potter!’ ”

Several reviewers complained that while most of the numbers in the book appeared satisfactorily random, the pages themselves were in numerical order.

. . . .

One Amazon reviewer panned a real-life copycat publication called “A Million Random Digits THE SEQUEL: with Perfectly Uniform Distribution.” “Let’s be honest, 4735942 is just a rehashed version of 64004382, and 32563233 is really nothing more than 97132654 with an accent.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire) and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

From The Guardian:

Not long ago, an old friend with whom I’ve lost touch, the writer Susan Braudy, surfaced in the letters column in the New York Times Book Review. This is a kind of pitiable place for writers to show up. They are usually either protesting their treatment by the Book Review, or, at least in the years before Amazon, begging for copies of their out-of-print books.

My old friend, however, had a grander mission, one that seemed to have weighed on her mind for many years – how to get the Times to be more joyful and energetic about promoting books.

. . . .

Her letter reminded me that the New York Times Book Review still occupies a whale-like place in the minds and careers of all diligent book writers in America.

. . . .

And then, a few weeks ago, I noticed, in a small announcement in the New York Times, the appointment of a new editor at the Book Review – once a major transfer of power in New York. Indeed, the editor of the Book Review, and his or her general literary disposition, is pretty much synonymous with the Book Review itself.

. . . .

[New editor Pamela Paul] has, pretty much, no writerly or literary credentials. She’s written some straightforward, but non-literary nonfiction – a book about marriage, a book about parenting, and a book condemning pornography – and she’s been the children’s book editor at the Book Review for a short time. Her resume includes two years as a blogger at the Huffington Post, which, it doesn’t seem entirely churlish to point out, is not a job, and a stint writing a column for the Times’ Style section.

Anyway, it’s a perfectly reasonable but not distinguished freelance journalism career. So why a major post in the world of literary journalism?

. . . .

The entire newspaper is challenged by falling advertising, but the Book Review is really at the end of this road. Practically speaking, it has no revenue.

This is a long slide, reflecting not just a hard market but the manners of a bygone world.

. . . .

In a way, it might be a good thing to have recruited a new editor without literary conceit whose success depends less on taste than it does on the Book Review’s very survival. Maybe, she has a really smart and aggressive new approach, which she’s sold to the Times’ management.

On the other hand, the approach so far seems just to give less space to reviews. The bestseller lists, derived from overlapping and trivial new methods of categorization, now fill most of the back pages.

. . . .

Book reviews, I am afraid, are a downer, an outdated form. Literary editors – hell, literary people in general – are mightily outdated, too.

And while the NYTBR has been at the very center of the book business in New York and has been the most influential voice in book culture for the better part of a century, it is surely hard to say quite what to do with this weighty history. Not to mention, how to squeeze a buck out of it.

Link to the rest at The Guardian and thanks to Tom for the tip.

From author Deborah Copaken Kogan on The Nation:

My latest novel was just long-listed 
for Britain’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize. I cried when I heard. Then I Googled it. Here are a few things I learned: it was founded in response to the 1991 Booker Prize, whose nominees were all men; it is frequently modified by the adjective “prestigious”; and it is controversial. Why do we need a separate prize for women, ask the columnists, year after year, in one form or another, following the announcement of the nominees.

“The Orange Prize is a sexist con-trick” posited a prize-winning male novelist in 2008. “The past is gone,” he wrote. “Get over it.”

The 2012 VIDA statistics have been out for some time now, so I won’t linger over the current and quantifiable inequity—yes, even in this magazine—in the frequency with which male and female writers are reviewed today, five years after the past was deemed “gone.” It’s a proven fact, backed by simple math even my first grader can understand: the number of reviews of books by men is greater than the number of reviews of books by women; the number of male reviewers is greater than the number of female reviewers. Men, in other words, are still the arbiters of taste, the cultural gatekeepers, and the recipients of what little attention still gets paid to books.

. . . .

It’s 1999. I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary. I’m thrilled when I hear this: a new job; self-reliance; the gift of time to do the work I’ve been dreaming of since childhood. The book is sold on the basis of a proposal and a first chapter under the title Newswhore, which is the insult often lobbed at us both externally and from within our own ranks—a way of noting, with a combination of shame and black humor, the vulture-like nature of our livelihood, and a means of reclaiming, as I see it, the word “whore,” since I want to write about sexual and gender politics as well. Random House changes the book’s title to Shutterbabe, which a friend came up with. I beg for Shuttergirl instead, to reclaim at least “girl,” as Lena Dunham would so expertly do years later. Or what about Develop Stop Fix? Anything besides a title with the word “babe” in it.

I’m told I have no say in the matter. The cover that the publisher designs has a naked cartoon torso against a pink background with a camera covering the genitalia. I tell them it’s usually my eye behind the camera, not my vagina. I fight—hard—to change the cover. Thankfully, I win this one, agreeing to shoot the cover photo myself, gratis. When my publicist tries to pitch the book to NPR’s Terry Gross, a producer tells him that Terry likes the “Shutter” part of the title but not the “babe” part.

. . . .

I write to the publications who called me a slutty Barbie stay-at-home mom and/or an insult to feminism, not to ask for a public retraction, but to request privately—privately! I don’t want to get smeared—that they carefully reconsider how they’re reviewing women. “Would you call a male author a stay-at-home dad?” I ask, among other rhetorical questions.

. . . .

It’s now 2012. My fourth book, The Red Book, future nominee for the prestigious yet controversial Women’s Prize for Fiction and New York Times bestseller, gets passed over for a review in The New York Times Book Review, just like its predecessors. One morning, I hit a few independent bookstores to sign stock. Our publishers urge us to do so during a book’s first weeks. “Was it reviewed in the Times?” one bookseller asks me, searching his computer for any sign of the novel, which he was unable to locate on the shelves. I tell him no. “Then we probably don’t stock it.” I hear the same story from three more booksellers before heading home with my pristine Sharpie.

Link to the rest at The Nation and thanks to Catherine for the tip.

From Dave Farland:

People will judge your movies and stories regardless of how insecure you may feel about it. Sometimes their judgments will be fair and accurate, but just as often they’ll be biased, foolish, unfounded or downright deranged.

So you need to know as you come into this business that you’re going to get criticism. You’ll get it from professional critics, from editors, from agents, from housewives, from retirees, from inmates in prison, and soldiers in the field. You’ll get it from ten-year-old kids and great grandmothers. You’ll get it from people in Russia, Latin America, Australia, and Greece. You’ll get it from your spouse, children, and your own parents. On some occasions, you might get it from all of these people in a single day!

So don’t fool yourself with the notion that you can be a writer or a filmmaker and not get criticism.

. . . .

In fact, there is only one rational reaction to it: listen to each criticism, evaluate its validity, and resolve to improve your work as a result of those criticisms that are valid.

. . . .

You can try to change their minds, but arguing with such people wastes your time, saps your creative energy, and generally doesn’t gain you any converts. You won’t change their minds by defeating them in an argument, but very often I’ve found that I gained someone’s trust simply by showing them a little kindness. On more than one occasion I’ve had someone complain about a work that they had misread, and simply by treating that person with compassion and respect I’ve found that readers who had sworn that they would never read anything I’d written again have become die-hard fans.

Link to the rest at David Farland and thanks to Eric for the tip.

Dave also shared a summary of the results of the Book Bomb for his injured son in which many visitors to The Passive Voice participated:

Nightingale Best Seller Rankings

Amazon

#84 Paid in Kindle Store

#1 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Contemporary

#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Fantasy > Contemporary

#2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Fantasy > Paranormal

Barnes and Noble

Sales Rank: 122

Million Dollar Outlines Best Seller Rankings

Amazon

#121 Paid in Kindle Store

#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Education & Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Editing
#1 in Books > Education & Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Writing > Editing
#6 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction

Barnes and Noble

Sales Rank: 248

From FutureBook:

The acquisition of Goodreads by Amazon serves as a reminder of how bifurcated the book business now is. As bookshops waited for a busy Easter weekend, on twitter and other social networks the commentariat declared ‘game over’ in the battle for the future reader, after Amazon announced that it had bought the bookish social network late Thursday.

As Porter Anderson details in his fine column at Publishing Perspectives: “The Amazonian Apocalypse indeed was upon us. We were up to our digital derrieres in that greatest of all booky community blessings: reach out and share the hysteria.”

. . . .

The acquisition struck a nerve because for many Goodreads had come to be seen as the antithesis of Amazon. A website for book lovers that held your hand rather than rifled through your pockets looking for small change. It was also exploring a bit of the world that Amazon was NOT doing well, the area we now define as discoverability. As Goodreads founder Otis Chandler put it in his blog about the sale: “Our team gets out of bed every day motivated by the belief that the right book in the right hands can change the world.”

It was also sharing data, or starting to, about what readers wanted to read and how much they wanted to read it. As Amazon’s press release stated: Over just the past 90 days, Goodreads members have added more than four books per second to the ‘want to read’ shelves on Goodreads. It was talking and publishers were listening.

But Goodreads’ influence may have been overstated because it was NOT Amazon, and actually like most social networks it was most likely struggling to turn users into cash. There are no publicly available figures about its financial performance, its business strategy, or its reach into the UK. How many books were actually sold because of Goodreads, no-one seems to have a clue.

Link to the rest at FutureBook

PG thinks this is probably the last post on the Amazon/Goodreads deal. Absent the conniption it caused in the traditional publishing world, it would have been a so-so one-day story.

If you didn’t know better, you would think that some people feel threatened.