[contextly_auto_sidebar id="TUHr64z55mkmhkosqXugONtslgtzjq1a"] IT'S hard to know what an author or publisher should do when faced with Amazon's dominance of the market: It's hard to withdraw from a distributor who handles so large a portion of book (especially e-book) sales. But just as several small record labels have pulled their music from Spotify and other streaming services, the … [Read more...]
German Writers Stand Up to Amazon
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="hPvvYov9l3ydhtOyPeAaXmviWmWA6lEM"] WHETHER opposition to the online octopus is growing and spreading is hard to tell, but some of the anger we've seen in the US literary community seems to be driving authors in the German-speaking world as well. A New York Times story reports that more than a thousand German-language authors have written a letter of protest. The … [Read more...]
Amazon Attacks… George Orwell
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="FGMaW10z0XI8nVQN7MfT1Ac9PxVEGJCS"] BOY, this is weird. The online bookseller, in an attempt to tackle its critics, has been quoting George Orwell WAY out of context. A New York Times story gets at the whole messy business. In 1936 Orwell told a British paper: “The Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if the other publishers had any … [Read more...]
Creativity and “Powers of Two”
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="h6kHO9RuWKQjpO1pgA06PU80n7f3lQ1n"] JOSHUA Wolf Shenk's new book, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs, is the subject of my latest story. Shenk looks at more than 100 partnerships -- some overt, some hidden -- to try to distill the process of creation and derive patterns. He works especially with figures in literature and the arts -- … [Read more...]
How Do Writers Make Their Living?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="7bGpqAdbG8eEXFCQfCXKxBmqMplgXX5l"] AFTER a long period in which authors and other scribes shied away from going public with their finances -- perhaps not wanting to seem like they were "in it for the money" -- the economics of the literary life have become more transparent lately. This is partly, I suspect, because of the greater concern for economics that arrived … [Read more...]
Will Amazon Crush Publishing?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="vKKFLjwmwHjYmDjG3md6BwURLIgqKbsB"] RECENTLY I've written a bit about Amazon and other giant tech companies and how they have begun to crush the world of culture, and the people who make it, while the Department of Justice and other regulatory agencies sleep. These are longstanding concerns of mine, as a journalist who writes about music and the arts, as well as the … [Read more...]
More Bad New For Authors
BOOKS and publishing seems to be coming to terms with creative destruction these days much as musicians began to a few years back. The latest batch of bad news comes from the UK, in which a survey shows that authors have lost significant financial ground over the last eight years and make, on median, about 11 pounds, below Britain's equivalent of the poverty rate. Here's The Guardian: According … [Read more...]
Tom Perrotta’s “The Leftovers”
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="MrCO2VFKSM6GvoqcLDS6xaupSfsgna7y"] RECENTLY I spoke to the author of the novel HBO has adapted into a Sunday-night series. Both the novel and the show concern a small town from which a small but significant number of people have mysteriously vanished; most of the storytelling concern the way people deal in various -- and variously conflicting ways -- with the loss. … [Read more...]
Taking on Amazon
THERE'S been so much bad news as the online Goliath has crushed bookstores and tangled with publishers, that it's nice to see a bit of silver lining. Two new developments make us smile a bit here at CultureCrash, where we are too often locked into a grim expression. First, a talented first-time novelist has received an unlikely bounce from Stephen Colbert, who used Edan Lepucki's new book as an … [Read more...]
Publishing’s Shrinking Attention Span
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="CAxR2RewOYpbx08DLip9Jb3pvG0eQ2Sw"] THE Scottish novelist Val McDermid, who has sold 10 million books, says she wouldn't have a career in today's relentless marketplace. One of the things the Internet and the superstar economy have done is to shrink our already shrunken attention spans further, and that's doubly true in the culture industries. Crime writer … [Read more...]