by: Nick Morgan
What do Harvard Business Publishing and Harlequin – the publisher of a gazillion romance novels – have in common? More than you might think. I’ve blogged before about Harvard’s efforts to create a community of readers, thinkers, and kibitzers. It turns out that Harlequin has been doing the same for nearly 15 years – long before the Internet made it easy, or at least easier.
The romance novel publisher has a devoted following of mostly women who devour its books, and Harlequin has helped them create a community that talks about a great deal more than the torrid fiction itself. I spoke with some of the people who run Harlequin recently, and Eleanor Elliott, Director, Digital Capabilities, Digital & Internet, explains how they think about their readers:
Harlequin has always had a direct relationship with our readers, and it’s not just about us connecting to them, but also about encouraging and facilitating the connections they make with each other and with our authors. We’ve had an online community for almost 15 years where readers can talk to each other, to Harlequin employees, and to our authors. And while we absolutely talk about what books we’re reading, we also talk about our lives. Over the years our community has shared many milestones together – we’ve celebrated marriages, births, debut author contracts (we love those!) and we’ve also shed a few tears and supported each other through difficult times.
Every year at the Romance Writers of America conference, we host a “Pajama Party”, and it’s always delightful to see people who’ve connected online meet each other IRL (In Real Life) for the first time. It’s very gratifying knowing we created a place where friendship can grow.
What I love about that attitude is that it shows a way of thinking about readers that goes way beyond the obvious and the utilitarian. I’m hoping that some traditional publishers read Eleanor’s words and say to themselves, “Why don’t we do that?”
What’s my angle? As a reader, writer, and passionate follower of all things book-related, the narrow thinking about audience of most of the traditional publishers has always mystified me. More recently, I’ve become alarmed as audiences have continued to fracture and shrink. It’s harder and harder for any but the most established authors to find audiences and the traditional publishers seem absurdly myopic and unhelpful in this regard.
Set against that Harlequin’s flexibility in the face of technological change, as indicated by Eleanor, again:
We use social media extensively. Our digital strategy is not different from what Harlequin’s strategy has always been – which is be where women are. That’s why, decades ago, Harlequin put books in grocery stores. Now, women are the heaviest users of social media, and we need to be there and communicate with them on their terms. We use technology such as discussion forums, chat, blogs, and live video streaming with integrated chat to facilitate that connection. But it’s really not about the tools and gadgets…it’s about how those tools enable the connection that matters. In fact, when we relaunched our community earlier this year, we stripped back on some techno-toys and went with a more traditional discussion forum platform because our members told us that all the bells and whistles got in the way of true, meaningful discussion.
Now, that’s how publishers should be thinking. Yes to technology, but in service to the community. Exactly.
And while so many traditional publishers are predicting Armageddon, Harlequin is cheerfully expanding beyond romance into ‘serious’ fiction and non-fiction and keeping its technological options open. As Craig Swinwood, COO, North America, explains,
From Harlequin’s viewpoint, the publishing landscape is one of great opportunity. One of the pillars of our strategy has always been to provide great reading entertainment for women, whenever, wherever and however they choose to read. As digital publishing increases the availability and accessibility of this content, Harlequin is well positioned to adapt and innovate along the value chain to enhance the reading experience. Great editorial is key and we remain committed to providing it based on how our readers want to consume it.
So today, even though I’ve never read — and certainly never written — a romance novel, I’m grateful to Harlequin for getting what the reading experience is all about and putting its customers first. Thanks to Eleanor, Craig, and Melanie Dulos, who connected us. May traditional publishers begin to get this idea of relating to readers before it’s too late.
from: Forbes
Friday, October 12, 2012
Thursday, October 11, 2012
The library with no rules
Manila's Reading Club 2000 is a library like no other: it lets anyone borrow and then bring back or keep any of its thousands of books
Books, believes Hernando Guanlao, need to live. And they're only alive if they are being read. Thought and effort, time and money went into making them; they will never repay it lying idle in a cabinet or on a shelf. Books need to be set free. So walk by his home on Balagtas Street in Makati, downtown Manila, and it seems books are pretty much all you'll see. Thousands of them, on shelves and in crates outside on the pavement, piled high in the garage and on the stairs, each one free to anyone who wants it.
"People can borrow, take home, bring back or keep," says Guanlao, 60, a former tax accountant, ice-cream salesman and government employee known by all as Nanie. "Or they can share and pass on to another. But basically they should just take, take!" Guanlao reckons books "have lives, and have to lead them. They have work to do. And the act of giving a book …it makes you complete. It makes your life meaningful and abundant."
Thankfully for Guanlao's faith in human nature, people also give – often people he has never previously met, or doesn't even see: they leave boxes of books outside his door. "What's taken gets replaced many times over," he says. "I don't keep an inventory. But there are a lot of books. They want to be read, so they come here."
The Reading Club 2000, as it is called, began 12 years ago as a tribute to Guanlao's late parents, both civil servants. "They gave me my love of reading," he says. "I wanted to honour them and to do some kind of community service. So I put my old books – and my brothers' and sisters', maybe 100 in all – outside, to see if anyone was interested."
It took a while for people to work out that this was, as Guanlao puts it, a library "open 24/7, and with no rules", but the scheme, offering everything from battered crime paperbacks to fashion magazines, technical manuals, arcane histories and school textbooks, is booming.
It is helped by the fact that despite a 1994 act pledging "reading centres throughout the country", the Philippines, with a population of 92 million, has fewer than 700 public libraries, and buying books is a luxury many cannot afford.
Fortunately the Reading Club is spreading. Guanlao takes boxes of books into Manila's neighbourhoods himself, on a specially adapted book bike. He has also helped friends set up similar schemes at 10 other sites around the country, and inspired student book drives.
Aurora Verayo, from a town several hours drive from Manila, says she came to see Guanlao to donate books, but he persuaded her to open her own centre. "I'm going a step further and offering reading sessions for children," she says. "This is the start of a movement." Mark, a 16-year-old accountancy student at the Philippine Christian University in Manila, is organising a book drive with friends. "We've collected 90 books so far, and we expect many more," he says. "We're taking them to the barrios next month. Books open minds. A book can take you anywhere."
from: Guardian
 |
| Hernando Guanlao and his library in the centre of Manila in the Philippines |
"People can borrow, take home, bring back or keep," says Guanlao, 60, a former tax accountant, ice-cream salesman and government employee known by all as Nanie. "Or they can share and pass on to another. But basically they should just take, take!" Guanlao reckons books "have lives, and have to lead them. They have work to do. And the act of giving a book …it makes you complete. It makes your life meaningful and abundant."
Thankfully for Guanlao's faith in human nature, people also give – often people he has never previously met, or doesn't even see: they leave boxes of books outside his door. "What's taken gets replaced many times over," he says. "I don't keep an inventory. But there are a lot of books. They want to be read, so they come here."
The Reading Club 2000, as it is called, began 12 years ago as a tribute to Guanlao's late parents, both civil servants. "They gave me my love of reading," he says. "I wanted to honour them and to do some kind of community service. So I put my old books – and my brothers' and sisters', maybe 100 in all – outside, to see if anyone was interested."
It took a while for people to work out that this was, as Guanlao puts it, a library "open 24/7, and with no rules", but the scheme, offering everything from battered crime paperbacks to fashion magazines, technical manuals, arcane histories and school textbooks, is booming.
It is helped by the fact that despite a 1994 act pledging "reading centres throughout the country", the Philippines, with a population of 92 million, has fewer than 700 public libraries, and buying books is a luxury many cannot afford.
Fortunately the Reading Club is spreading. Guanlao takes boxes of books into Manila's neighbourhoods himself, on a specially adapted book bike. He has also helped friends set up similar schemes at 10 other sites around the country, and inspired student book drives.
Aurora Verayo, from a town several hours drive from Manila, says she came to see Guanlao to donate books, but he persuaded her to open her own centre. "I'm going a step further and offering reading sessions for children," she says. "This is the start of a movement." Mark, a 16-year-old accountancy student at the Philippine Christian University in Manila, is organising a book drive with friends. "We've collected 90 books so far, and we expect many more," he says. "We're taking them to the barrios next month. Books open minds. A book can take you anywhere."
from: Guardian
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Hold the front page: cover art is going out of fashion
Given that e-readers have no use for cover illustrations, how will books of the future be displayed?
by: James Bridle
Leaf through a copy of Phil Baines's Penguin by Design and you'll see the evolution of almost 80 years of book covers. From the stark formalism of Edward Young's horizontal orange bands (admittedly offset by his cheeky logo), through German typographer Jan Tschichold's even starker redesign of the late 1940s, to Germano Facetti and Romek Marber's 1960s grids, and a host of visual experiments in the Pelican, Penguin Specials and Classics ranges, Penguin's covers stood for many things besides the brand itself: for quality in literature; for a range of genres; for mood, atmosphere and style. And while Penguin's succession of superstar art directors may have been masters of the form, the cover has remained of central importance in publishing and bookselling for all involved, not least authors, up to the present day – but not, perhaps, for much longer.
Covers increasingly exist not as foot-high billboards and paintings on shelves, but as blurred, compressed little icons in lists on websites and devices, inscrutable jumbles of pixels that tell us little about the work. When read on an e-reader, books open to the first page of the text; the traditional cover increasingly seems irrelevant.
So will a new method for displaying books emerge? One possible path is offered by music platform Soundcloud, where songs are represented in the form of soundwaves. Could a book's text give form to its cover in a similar fashion, becoming its own representation? It's not so far-fetched. The work of a designer like Stefanie Posavec, whose Literary Organism visualises Kerouac's On the Road as a branching flower of sentence structures and themes, is more like a book as we understand it in our era of increasing information literacy than any photograph or drawing.
"Never judge a book by its cover", runs the adage. But if text and cover become inseparable, then it might be possible to do so.
from: Guardian
by: James Bridle
Leaf through a copy of Phil Baines's Penguin by Design and you'll see the evolution of almost 80 years of book covers. From the stark formalism of Edward Young's horizontal orange bands (admittedly offset by his cheeky logo), through German typographer Jan Tschichold's even starker redesign of the late 1940s, to Germano Facetti and Romek Marber's 1960s grids, and a host of visual experiments in the Pelican, Penguin Specials and Classics ranges, Penguin's covers stood for many things besides the brand itself: for quality in literature; for a range of genres; for mood, atmosphere and style. And while Penguin's succession of superstar art directors may have been masters of the form, the cover has remained of central importance in publishing and bookselling for all involved, not least authors, up to the present day – but not, perhaps, for much longer.
Covers increasingly exist not as foot-high billboards and paintings on shelves, but as blurred, compressed little icons in lists on websites and devices, inscrutable jumbles of pixels that tell us little about the work. When read on an e-reader, books open to the first page of the text; the traditional cover increasingly seems irrelevant.
So will a new method for displaying books emerge? One possible path is offered by music platform Soundcloud, where songs are represented in the form of soundwaves. Could a book's text give form to its cover in a similar fashion, becoming its own representation? It's not so far-fetched. The work of a designer like Stefanie Posavec, whose Literary Organism visualises Kerouac's On the Road as a branching flower of sentence structures and themes, is more like a book as we understand it in our era of increasing information literacy than any photograph or drawing.
"Never judge a book by its cover", runs the adage. But if text and cover become inseparable, then it might be possible to do so.
from: Guardian
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Time Is On Your Side
Did you see those silly cats on Tumblr, that breaking news on Twitter, and those photos of your friend’s kids on Facebook? Different social networks have their own distinct personalities. Bitly links are shared across all social networking services, giving us a unique viewpoint on how these networks differ.
We track metrics like the main type of content being shared on a network, the geographic locations of the people sharing and viewing the content, and how the popularity of the network has risen and fallen compared to other networks. Studying the differences between these networks leads us to interesting insights, for example, did you know that the half-life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours?
Recently weʼve been exploring how content propagates (or “goes viral”) through social networks, particularly how the day and time something is posted affects the eventual amount of attention it will receive.
Note: All the plots are based on EST. You will see day of the week, starting with Monday, on the Y axis, and hour of the day, starting with midnight, along the X axis. For the first plot in each section, the darker the blue block, the more traffic on average links posted during that hour received in the following 24 hour period of time. White blocks, show when links got less traffic. For the second plot, the darker blue represents when the site is most active, which we calculate based on number of clicks on Bitly links coming from these social platforms.
Twitter
For Twitter, posting in the afternoon earlier in the week is your best chance at achieving a high click count (1-3pm Monday through Thursday). Posting after 8pm should be avoided. Specifically, don’t bother posting after 3pm on a Friday since, as far as being a gateway to drive traffic to your content, it appears that Twitter doesn’t work on weekends.
The peaks of Twitter activity fall before the optimal time to post. The peak traffic times for Twitter are 9am through 3pm, Monday through Thursday. Posting on Twitter when there are many people clicking does help raise the average number of clicks, but it in no way guarantees an optimal amount of attention, since there is more competition for any individual’s attention. An optimal strategy must weigh the number of people paying attention against the number of other posts vying for that attention.
Facebook
Links posted from 1pm to 4pm result in the highest average click throughs. The peak time of the week was on Wednesday at 3pm. Links posted after 8pm and before 8am will have more difficulty achieving high amounts of attention. As with Twitter, avoid posting on the weekends.
Facebook traffic peeks mid-week, 1 to 3pm. While traffic starts to increase around 9am, one would be wise to wait to post until 11am. Traffic from Facebook fades after 4pm. Despite similar traffic counts at 8pm and 7pm, posting at 7pm will result in more clicks on average than posting at 8pm.
Tumblr
Tumblr likes to party! This network shows a drastically different pattern of usage from Facebook and Twitter. One should wait until at least 4pm to post. Also postings after 7pm on average receive more clicks over 24 hours than content posted mid-day during the week. Friday evening, a no-man’s land on other platforms, is an optimal time to post on Tumblr.
Bitly traffic from Tumblr peaks between 7pm and 10pm on Monday and Tuesday, with similar traffic on Sunday.
Conclusion
It’s easy to see that just like your neighborhood restaurants, each social network has its own culture and behavior patterns. By understanding the simple characteristics of each social network, you can publish your content at exactly the right time for it to reach the maximum number of people.
from: bitly blog
We track metrics like the main type of content being shared on a network, the geographic locations of the people sharing and viewing the content, and how the popularity of the network has risen and fallen compared to other networks. Studying the differences between these networks leads us to interesting insights, for example, did you know that the half-life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours?
Recently weʼve been exploring how content propagates (or “goes viral”) through social networks, particularly how the day and time something is posted affects the eventual amount of attention it will receive.
Note: All the plots are based on EST. You will see day of the week, starting with Monday, on the Y axis, and hour of the day, starting with midnight, along the X axis. For the first plot in each section, the darker the blue block, the more traffic on average links posted during that hour received in the following 24 hour period of time. White blocks, show when links got less traffic. For the second plot, the darker blue represents when the site is most active, which we calculate based on number of clicks on Bitly links coming from these social platforms.
For Twitter, posting in the afternoon earlier in the week is your best chance at achieving a high click count (1-3pm Monday through Thursday). Posting after 8pm should be avoided. Specifically, don’t bother posting after 3pm on a Friday since, as far as being a gateway to drive traffic to your content, it appears that Twitter doesn’t work on weekends.
The peaks of Twitter activity fall before the optimal time to post. The peak traffic times for Twitter are 9am through 3pm, Monday through Thursday. Posting on Twitter when there are many people clicking does help raise the average number of clicks, but it in no way guarantees an optimal amount of attention, since there is more competition for any individual’s attention. An optimal strategy must weigh the number of people paying attention against the number of other posts vying for that attention.
Links posted from 1pm to 4pm result in the highest average click throughs. The peak time of the week was on Wednesday at 3pm. Links posted after 8pm and before 8am will have more difficulty achieving high amounts of attention. As with Twitter, avoid posting on the weekends.
Facebook traffic peeks mid-week, 1 to 3pm. While traffic starts to increase around 9am, one would be wise to wait to post until 11am. Traffic from Facebook fades after 4pm. Despite similar traffic counts at 8pm and 7pm, posting at 7pm will result in more clicks on average than posting at 8pm.
Tumblr
Tumblr likes to party! This network shows a drastically different pattern of usage from Facebook and Twitter. One should wait until at least 4pm to post. Also postings after 7pm on average receive more clicks over 24 hours than content posted mid-day during the week. Friday evening, a no-man’s land on other platforms, is an optimal time to post on Tumblr.
Bitly traffic from Tumblr peaks between 7pm and 10pm on Monday and Tuesday, with similar traffic on Sunday.
Conclusion
It’s easy to see that just like your neighborhood restaurants, each social network has its own culture and behavior patterns. By understanding the simple characteristics of each social network, you can publish your content at exactly the right time for it to reach the maximum number of people.
from: bitly blog
Friday, October 5, 2012
Stranger, young adult novel with gay hero, acquired by publisher
Viking Penguin signs unchanged version of novel which ignited a row after a literary agent advised authors to 'straightwash'
by: Alison Flood
Yuki, the gay protagonist of a young adult novel whose authors were told to make him straight if they wished to find a publisher, has found a happy ending after Viking Penguin acquired the book he stars in – and allowed him to remain gay.
Last year the American novelists Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown unleashed a wave of support after they revealed that a major literary agent had agreed to take on their post-apocalyptic young adult novel Stranger – provided they make Yuki, a gay teen with a boyfriend, straight. "When you refuse to allow major characters in YA novels to be gay, you are telling gay teenagers that they are so utterly horrible that people like them can't even be allowed to exist in fiction," they said at the time.
But despite the unnamed agent's belief that a gay main character would put publishers off the novel, Viking, an imprint of Penguin, has just signed up Stranger and will publish in winter 2014. And Yuki, one of five main characters, is still gay. So are the supporting characters Brisa and Becky, a lesbian couple.
Brown said she was never tempted to "straightwash" Yuki to find a publisher because she and her co-author wanted the novel "to be about the people who are so often left out … Latinos and African-Americans, Jews and Asian-Americans, gay boys and lesbian girls, multiracial teenagers and teenagers with physical and mental disabilities".
"We noticed that while there are lots of excellent realistic books about the troubles and difficulties of being a minority, there was very little fun, escapist fiction about teenage wizards or vampires or mutants who aren't white and straight. And of what little there was, most had those characters as sidekicks to the straight white protagonist. So the many teens we knew who preferred fantasy almost never got to read about heroes like themselves," she said. "We didn't do this to fulfil some imaginary quota, but because we wanted to write about teenagers like the real ones we know, [and] making gay characters straight would have gone against the entire reason why we wrote the book in the first place."
Brown said that a number of her writer friends had revealed similar experiences, "with agents and editors, over non-white characters and over gay and lesbian characters and even disabled characters", and pointed to the author Malinda Lo's statistical analysis of all YA novels published in America over the last 40 years. "She found that less than 1% had any LGBTQ characters whatsoever, even in minor supporting roles," said Brown. "That confirmed our decision to go public. Whatever people believed about our own story, there was clearly a genuine issue at hand."
The author hopes that being honest about their experiences will have made a difference. "We are only two of a great many people trying to make a better, more just and inclusive world. I hope that we've contributed one small piece to a much larger movement... and that in the future, some bestseller about mutant or alien or gladiator teenagers will have its inevitable love triangle consist of a girl who must decide between the two girls who love her," she said.
by: Alison Flood
Yuki, the gay protagonist of a young adult novel whose authors were told to make him straight if they wished to find a publisher, has found a happy ending after Viking Penguin acquired the book he stars in – and allowed him to remain gay.
Last year the American novelists Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown unleashed a wave of support after they revealed that a major literary agent had agreed to take on their post-apocalyptic young adult novel Stranger – provided they make Yuki, a gay teen with a boyfriend, straight. "When you refuse to allow major characters in YA novels to be gay, you are telling gay teenagers that they are so utterly horrible that people like them can't even be allowed to exist in fiction," they said at the time.
But despite the unnamed agent's belief that a gay main character would put publishers off the novel, Viking, an imprint of Penguin, has just signed up Stranger and will publish in winter 2014. And Yuki, one of five main characters, is still gay. So are the supporting characters Brisa and Becky, a lesbian couple.
Brown said she was never tempted to "straightwash" Yuki to find a publisher because she and her co-author wanted the novel "to be about the people who are so often left out … Latinos and African-Americans, Jews and Asian-Americans, gay boys and lesbian girls, multiracial teenagers and teenagers with physical and mental disabilities".
"We noticed that while there are lots of excellent realistic books about the troubles and difficulties of being a minority, there was very little fun, escapist fiction about teenage wizards or vampires or mutants who aren't white and straight. And of what little there was, most had those characters as sidekicks to the straight white protagonist. So the many teens we knew who preferred fantasy almost never got to read about heroes like themselves," she said. "We didn't do this to fulfil some imaginary quota, but because we wanted to write about teenagers like the real ones we know, [and] making gay characters straight would have gone against the entire reason why we wrote the book in the first place."
Brown said that a number of her writer friends had revealed similar experiences, "with agents and editors, over non-white characters and over gay and lesbian characters and even disabled characters", and pointed to the author Malinda Lo's statistical analysis of all YA novels published in America over the last 40 years. "She found that less than 1% had any LGBTQ characters whatsoever, even in minor supporting roles," said Brown. "That confirmed our decision to go public. Whatever people believed about our own story, there was clearly a genuine issue at hand."
The author hopes that being honest about their experiences will have made a difference. "We are only two of a great many people trying to make a better, more just and inclusive world. I hope that we've contributed one small piece to a much larger movement... and that in the future, some bestseller about mutant or alien or gladiator teenagers will have its inevitable love triangle consist of a girl who must decide between the two girls who love her," she said.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Groovin’ To The Classics
Brace yourselves — officially licensed “Fifty Shades of Grey” products are about to hit shelves (including a version of the iconic necktie from Van Heusen).
EMI Music hosted a launch party in NYC for a classical music “soundtrack” on Monday, which uses the book’s cover art. It includes 15 classical pieces selected by E.L. James, the trilogy’s author (it should be safe even for those libraries who have shied away from stocking the books).
The VP of Classics at EMI predicts it will sell 15,000 copies in the first week.
from: EarlyWord
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Reader recommendations a growing business in the book world
Need help finding your next favorite title? With new works like 'Start Here' and 'Read This!,' bloggers and booksellers aim to ease the way.
by: Carolyn Kellogg
This summer Molly Ringwald said that she read "Fifty Shades of Grey" because "when a book becomes that big, I feel like it's culturally relevant."
No book in recent memory has sold as fast as the lead title of E.L. James' erotic trilogy. It enjoyed an avalanche of popularity: The more people were reading it, the more other people wanted to read it. But "Fifty Shades" is the exception: Today it's easier than ever to find something to read. But the right thing? That's another matter altogether.
Almost any book you could hope to buy is just a few clicks away online. When it launched in 1995, Amazon proclaimed it was the world's largest bookstore; the site makes it easy to find what you know you want. What it's not as good at is helping you discover the thing you don't know you want but might like.
The ideal place to find that something new has traditionally been a room with a lot of shelves, display tables and maybe some helpful staff — like bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Yet they've been disappearing; when Borders went bankrupt in 2011, its nearly 400 bookstores closed, and there are half as many independent bookstores now as there were 20 years ago.
Seeing an opening, bloggers and booksellers have converged on the idea of telling people what they should read.
Last month the group blog Book Riot used the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to raise $25,000 for a volume of book recommendations. "Start Here" will point readers to the best entry point for famous authors, on the assumption that everyone has a writer they'd like to read but find too daunting.
With an emphasis on accessibility, "Start Here" is tapping a mix of writers, critics and bloggers to provide its recommendations. Among them is Kevin Smokler, a publishing consultant and author. He believes that the best way to suggest a book is when "the recommender writes like a human being and lets their passion show, naked and uninhibited." For the anthology, Smokler is writing about Sherman Alexie's short-story collection "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven."
That book, first published in 1993, is easy to find online, as is "Water Flowing Home," Alexie's 24-page collection of poems printed in 1995, even though it's so rare that it costs $500 and more. Just about any title you could want — and thousands you might never think to ask for — are easily purchased online.
All that choice can be downright paralyzing. That's where booksellers come in; they are professionals who can find what you're looking for, even if you don't know what it is. Former bookseller John Warner, now an author and professor, regularly appears as the Biblioracle in the Chicago Tribune: Tell him the last five books you've read, and he promises to tell you your next favorite.
The new book "Read This!" (Coffeehouse Press, $12) compiles similar expertise of booksellers from all over the country into one cheerful red volume. It was edited by Hans Weyandt, co-owner of Micawber's Books in St. Paul, Minn., who began the project on the store's blog.
"Lately it's become en vogue to describe booksellers as 'tastemakers' or 'curators,'" Weyandt writes. "Our job is to constantly search through the new and old to find works that entertain and challenge us, and make us want to pass them on."
Expect to find it near the cash register at your local independent bookstore. Subtitled "Handpicked Favorites from America's Indie Bookstores," the book is packed with lists and lists of books. The lists are given context with short profiles of the bookstores they come from and notes from the bookseller who created them.
The lists are intimidating — so many! And they all come with checkboxes! — but they are both broad and deep. If you like Zadie Smith, Larry Doyle and Graham Greene, says Subterranean Books in St. Louis, you'll probably like "The Slap," a dark comedy by Christos Tsiolkas.
Novelist Ann Patchett has written the introduction to "Read This!," describing the book as a "catalogue of matchmakers." She's uniquely positioned to think about how books reach readers — not only is she a bestselling author ("State of Wonder," "Bel Canto"), she's the owner of Parnassus Books, a new independent bookstore in her Nashville hometown.
"I love it when a book I might not naturally gravitate to is brought to my attention," she says.
The nonfiction book "The Other Wes Moore" is an example of what Patchett whimsically calls "a Universal Donor. Pretty much everyone, men, women, young readers, non-readers, they're all going to find something in this book."
On the other hand, she continues, "My favorite books this year are the Patrick Melrose novels of Edward St. Aubyn. Those books are decisively NOT Universal Donors. They're about as universal as anchovies, but they are electrifying and utterly brilliant."
One of the great delights of visiting friends' houses is peeking at the anchovies on their bookshelves. For readers, a line of book spines can be a window into a new love, a portrait of where we've been, a means of semi-public self-definition — something rendered invisible by e-readers.
"My Ideal Bookshelf" (coming in November from Little, Brown, $24.99), a visually entrancing collection of illustrations, explores how we use books to represent us. It's an expansion of the work of artist Jane Mount, who has been doing a series of paintings based on the essential reading lists of clients. She and writer Thessaly La Force, who interviewed all the contributors, got lists of books from writers, chefs, designers, musicians and artists.
"I think your books always tell a story about you," says La Force, a former online editor at the Paris Review studying at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. "They're a way to touch on ideas and thoughts that aren't your own but are essential to you. A lot of people would put books on shelves they hadn't read or were by someone who had touched their lives."
The "Ideal Bookshelf" images hold some surprises. Yes, chef Thomas Keller has a lot of books about French cooking, but he's also got one by the late UCLA basketball Coach John Wooden — because it's about teamwork, he says.
Judd Apatow includes Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes" because after Owen Wilson recommended it to him, it inspired him to begin reading again. Pop culture writer Chuck Klosterman's ideal bookshelf features the unexpected, massive Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination.
"There's an endless feeling of searching for something," says La Force. "You kind of are what you read — and what you're interested in reading becomes what you are."
from: LA Times
by: Carolyn Kellogg
This summer Molly Ringwald said that she read "Fifty Shades of Grey" because "when a book becomes that big, I feel like it's culturally relevant."
No book in recent memory has sold as fast as the lead title of E.L. James' erotic trilogy. It enjoyed an avalanche of popularity: The more people were reading it, the more other people wanted to read it. But "Fifty Shades" is the exception: Today it's easier than ever to find something to read. But the right thing? That's another matter altogether.
Almost any book you could hope to buy is just a few clicks away online. When it launched in 1995, Amazon proclaimed it was the world's largest bookstore; the site makes it easy to find what you know you want. What it's not as good at is helping you discover the thing you don't know you want but might like.
The ideal place to find that something new has traditionally been a room with a lot of shelves, display tables and maybe some helpful staff — like bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Yet they've been disappearing; when Borders went bankrupt in 2011, its nearly 400 bookstores closed, and there are half as many independent bookstores now as there were 20 years ago.
Seeing an opening, bloggers and booksellers have converged on the idea of telling people what they should read.
Last month the group blog Book Riot used the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to raise $25,000 for a volume of book recommendations. "Start Here" will point readers to the best entry point for famous authors, on the assumption that everyone has a writer they'd like to read but find too daunting.
With an emphasis on accessibility, "Start Here" is tapping a mix of writers, critics and bloggers to provide its recommendations. Among them is Kevin Smokler, a publishing consultant and author. He believes that the best way to suggest a book is when "the recommender writes like a human being and lets their passion show, naked and uninhibited." For the anthology, Smokler is writing about Sherman Alexie's short-story collection "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven."
That book, first published in 1993, is easy to find online, as is "Water Flowing Home," Alexie's 24-page collection of poems printed in 1995, even though it's so rare that it costs $500 and more. Just about any title you could want — and thousands you might never think to ask for — are easily purchased online.
All that choice can be downright paralyzing. That's where booksellers come in; they are professionals who can find what you're looking for, even if you don't know what it is. Former bookseller John Warner, now an author and professor, regularly appears as the Biblioracle in the Chicago Tribune: Tell him the last five books you've read, and he promises to tell you your next favorite.
The new book "Read This!" (Coffeehouse Press, $12) compiles similar expertise of booksellers from all over the country into one cheerful red volume. It was edited by Hans Weyandt, co-owner of Micawber's Books in St. Paul, Minn., who began the project on the store's blog.
"Lately it's become en vogue to describe booksellers as 'tastemakers' or 'curators,'" Weyandt writes. "Our job is to constantly search through the new and old to find works that entertain and challenge us, and make us want to pass them on."
Expect to find it near the cash register at your local independent bookstore. Subtitled "Handpicked Favorites from America's Indie Bookstores," the book is packed with lists and lists of books. The lists are given context with short profiles of the bookstores they come from and notes from the bookseller who created them.
The lists are intimidating — so many! And they all come with checkboxes! — but they are both broad and deep. If you like Zadie Smith, Larry Doyle and Graham Greene, says Subterranean Books in St. Louis, you'll probably like "The Slap," a dark comedy by Christos Tsiolkas.
Novelist Ann Patchett has written the introduction to "Read This!," describing the book as a "catalogue of matchmakers." She's uniquely positioned to think about how books reach readers — not only is she a bestselling author ("State of Wonder," "Bel Canto"), she's the owner of Parnassus Books, a new independent bookstore in her Nashville hometown.
"I love it when a book I might not naturally gravitate to is brought to my attention," she says.
The nonfiction book "The Other Wes Moore" is an example of what Patchett whimsically calls "a Universal Donor. Pretty much everyone, men, women, young readers, non-readers, they're all going to find something in this book."
On the other hand, she continues, "My favorite books this year are the Patrick Melrose novels of Edward St. Aubyn. Those books are decisively NOT Universal Donors. They're about as universal as anchovies, but they are electrifying and utterly brilliant."
One of the great delights of visiting friends' houses is peeking at the anchovies on their bookshelves. For readers, a line of book spines can be a window into a new love, a portrait of where we've been, a means of semi-public self-definition — something rendered invisible by e-readers.
"My Ideal Bookshelf" (coming in November from Little, Brown, $24.99), a visually entrancing collection of illustrations, explores how we use books to represent us. It's an expansion of the work of artist Jane Mount, who has been doing a series of paintings based on the essential reading lists of clients. She and writer Thessaly La Force, who interviewed all the contributors, got lists of books from writers, chefs, designers, musicians and artists.
"I think your books always tell a story about you," says La Force, a former online editor at the Paris Review studying at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. "They're a way to touch on ideas and thoughts that aren't your own but are essential to you. A lot of people would put books on shelves they hadn't read or were by someone who had touched their lives."
The "Ideal Bookshelf" images hold some surprises. Yes, chef Thomas Keller has a lot of books about French cooking, but he's also got one by the late UCLA basketball Coach John Wooden — because it's about teamwork, he says.
Judd Apatow includes Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes" because after Owen Wilson recommended it to him, it inspired him to begin reading again. Pop culture writer Chuck Klosterman's ideal bookshelf features the unexpected, massive Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination.
"There's an endless feeling of searching for something," says La Force. "You kind of are what you read — and what you're interested in reading becomes what you are."
from: LA Times
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