It seems that The Rake enjoyed Rick Moody’s The Diviners far more than I did. I spent the entirety of the reading period feeling that Moody had moved awkwardly out of his element, and the story itself reminded me uncomfortably of Bruce Wagner’s Still Holding.

I’m lazing around recovering from the paper-grading blitz, and so for today’s post, I give you: Quotes From The Land Of Semi-Literate College Students!

Some are poorly-written, some have odd typos, a few are simply bizarre…and they’re all directly from real student papers.

Read the rest of the article at Moggy Mania.

Want to read Cory Doctorow’s new book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, via RSS?

Read the rest of the article at Surfarama.

It’s from last year, and the focus is on Google’s book scanning project, but the article begins with the sobering text below.

Authors struggle, mostly in vain, against their fated obscurity. According to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks sales from major booksellers, only 2 percent of the 1.2 million unique titles sold in 2004 had sales of more than 5,000 copies.

Read the rest of the article at the New York Times.

Presidential historian Robert Dallek and journalist Terry Golway have collected Kennedy’s most famous speeches in a CD that accompanies their new book, Let Every Nation Know: John F. Kennedy in His Own Words.

Resources:

• Buy Let Every Nation Know: John F. Kennedy in His Own Words (Hardback) at Amazon.com
• Listen to Excerpts of the Speeches at National Public Radio
• Read about John F. Kennedy at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

I always linger over a sentence until I conclude that I lack the will or skill to improve upon it, whereupon I move on to the next sentence and then to the next. Ultimately–it could take days, an entire week–I have hand-printed enough sentences to form a paragraph.

Read the rest of the article at Yahoo News.

Resources:

• Buy A Writer’s Life (Hardback) at Amazon.com
• Read about Gay Talese at His Web Site

What did we say? Direct is taking 5400. 5400 x $4.19 = $22,626. Between themselves, the other bookselling outlets are taking 20,000, and they’re all getting (to make it easy) a 60% discount, which means they’re paying $2.796 per book. 20,000 x $2.796 = $55,920.

This book starts out making us $78,546. That is the gross profit.

This book starts out making the author $14,203.68 in royalties.

Minus cost, we’ve made $28,372.32. (At the moment, we are factoring in the author’s royalties, but we are not factoring in frieght [sic], or the cost of warehousing the 9,600 books that don’t get shipped.)

Phew. Tired of math yet? Too bad, there’s more.

Read the rest of the article at ALG.

In the early, heady days of the World Wide Web, the Utopian fantasy of having a virtual printing press in every home took hold. While the surface of the idea shone with an appealingly egalitarian luster, what we had long known–that most people do not write well–again became painfully apparent. The Web was not going to usher in a golden age of plebeian poetry.

By 2000 it had become clear that the Web had become largely a conduit for commerce. Some idealism remained, and Stephen King engaged in his famous experiment, publishing The Plant in serial fashion. The installments were made available in an unencrypted format, and payment was on the honor system. King and his publisher considered the experiment a failure, and that single announcement silenced many who had been clamoring for a new paradigm in publishing. The money men woke up, took the reins, and put the wheels of the cart back in their well-worn tracks, perhaps whipping the horse a little more than was strictly necessary in the process.

Although most of the publishing industry was going through recidivism, science fiction mavericks pushed ahead, Baen Books leading the charge. The Baen rallying cry, one Cory Doctorow often repeats as a reason for making his books freely available, was:

Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc. [1]

Baen authors and Doctorow claim that sales have been adequate, and while I certainly find their approach to publishing intriguing, I am not convinced that it will work for literary fiction in the same way that it seems to work for science fiction. Science fiction has the “cool” factor that creates wide interest, and its readership is already accustomed to doing most of its reading from a screen.

In the early days of the Web, I created a site for some of my writing and had the horrible experience of seeing my work propagate, often uncredited or simply with someone else’s name pasted where mine went, to other sites for the gain of others. This led to my pulling back from the Web and not posting any of my writing for many years. I still get the occasional e-mail from a harried English professor whose student has ripped off a poem of mine that was only on the Web for a period of eight months almost ten years ago.

Reference

1. Flint, Eric. “Introducing the Baen Free Library.” 11 Oct. 2000 http://www.baen.com/library/>.

Resources

• Read about The Plant at Wikipedia
• Read about Creative Commons Licenses at Creative Commons
• Read Criticism of Creative Commons at Alex Bosworth’s Weblog
• Read Criticism of Creative Commons at PC Magazine

I do not frequently read science fiction. Much of it is suitable only for adolescent boys and that barely. There is, however, a kind of science fiction that warms my progressive heart and gets my liberal blood moving. This kind of science fiction uses its future setting and advanced technology solely as distancing devices through which it makes social commentary more palatable. Vonnegut and Bradbury are the masters of this sub-genre. A friend suggested that Cory Doctorow’s novels take a similar approach.

The Internet could have developed into many things, but it has become a buzz machine and a distribution channel. Doctorow is skilled at getting both heads of the beast to roar. His liberal distribution policies under a Creative Commons license are what first caught my attention and will be the subject of tomorrow’s post. I downloaded Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom from his web site and am reading it on my Palm m500.

I am not yet deep into the novel, but so far the book is pleasant if not profound reading. Coined tech hipster terms like Whuffie, deadheading, and the Bitchun Society are a little too cutesy for me and elicit little grimaces. Doctorow writes with enough skill that he may win me over on that count before the end.

Resources:

• Buy Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Paperback) at Amazon.com
• Download Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom from Cory Doctorow’s Web Site
• Read about Cory Doctorow at Wikipedia

Recommended with reservations.

What I thought was a newspaper interview with John Updike actually appeared in Poets & Writers. The newspaper interview that I remembered (The Wall Street Journal, 8-9 October 2005, P8) does not mention the difficulties in the literary market. Updike’s condemnation of the current literary scene in Poets & Writers (Nov/Dec 2005, p. 36) is as follows:

Young writers tend by and large not to have anything as gritty as a hope of making a living or a hope of making a certain magazine. There are fewer magazines and they pay regrettably less. In the ’50s and ’60s you could support a middle-class family by selling six stories a year. I don’t think you [could] do that now. . .I feel fiction is slowly drifting toward the condition of poetry–being of interest to a small number of people, many of whom are aspiring poets themselves.

The current issue of Poets & Writers includes in its Trends section a short piece on the crisis in readership (”The Law of Diminishing Readership,” pp. 12-14). The article presents the following sobering ordered list:

1. Production of creative writing far exceeds consumer demand.
2. Accredited MFA programs in creative writing continue to proliferate, while the practice of literary reading is in steady decline.
3. Many publishers require underwriting to produce and distribute literary titles because sales do not support production costs.
4. Publishers can, with relative ease, attract a thousand manuscript submissions–plus reading fees–by sponsoring book contests.

Now, I have been able to make a go of it using the skills afforded by my BA and MA in Creative Writing, but I do not (yet–hope springs eternal) make money on fiction. I have to offer a variety of practical services to make ends meet. I am reminded of a grim newspaper interview with John Updike touching on the economics of fiction writing that I read in the past year. I will try to find that article for tomorrow’s entry.

Resources:

• Subscribe to Poets & Writers at Amazon.com
• Read about Poets & Writers at its official web site

Highly recommended.