Michael J. McCann's Blog: Open Investigations, page 14

The Price of Books

Photo by Wayne Cavanagh, 92.3 JACK FMMoney is tough to come by, these days. Everyone's feeling the pinch, and hard choices often have to be made between necessities and nice-to-haves. A warm house and food on the table must come first, and entertainment expenses must be carefully managed.

Christmas is traditionally a time when we try to loosen the purse strings a little. It's said that a book makes a great Christmas gift, and with that in mind I recently participated in the annual Christmas craft show at a local high school to sell my novels. The show turned out to be huge, apparently with more than twice the vendors from a year ago.

I love doing these events because they give me a chance to meet people and talk about what interests them. My books range in price from $14.95 to $19.95 for each paperback copy, and with the wallet in mind I've decided over the holidays to sell them at these shows for $15 a copy and $50 for the four-book mystery series, autograph included.

During this particular show, a woman came up to my table and delivered an incisive little rant on the high price of books. "How am I supposed to know what I'm getting for $15?" she said. "I may buy it and not even like it. That's a lot of money to spend on something I might end up throwing away."

There wasn't a thing she said that I haven't thought every time I stood behind a table trying to sell my books. It is a lot of money to ask, just on faith. I put a great deal of care and attention to detail into the design and appearance of the books, but what if I can't write a good story to save my life? I'm very grateful that The Rainy Day Killer was longlisted for the 2014 Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel in Canada, because it gives me something to say about the level of quality they'll hopefully discover when they get it home and start to read it. But still ..... fifteen bucks is a lot of money. I explained to her that people could visit my website and read an excerpt from each novel, to see if it might be something they'd like. I gave her one of my postcards advertising the series and told her I understood completely. She walked away, having spoken her piece.

She disappeared past the table next to me, where they were selling women's handbags for $35 a pop and cute tutus for little girls that were even more expensive. I don't know what people normally pay for that kind of stuff. I'm guessing it was reasonable, and I don't know how their sales were as the day wore on. However, I was selling like there was no tomorrow. It was a personal best for me that day. Books apparently do make an attractive Christmas gift!

And you know what? The woman who'd expressed her frustration about the high price of books returned to my table about twenty minutes later, my postcard still in her hand. She rapped her index finger on The Rainy Day Killer and said, "All right. I'll take that one."

Her concern about the price of books was obviously something she'd needed to get off her chest, and boy, I sympathize with her. Believe me. I signed the book, and as I gave it to her I held up crossed fingers and said, "I hope you like it."

"I'm sure I will," she said, and stormed off again.

Given how tight money is these days, I've still got those fingers crossed, ma'am.

Winner of the 2014 Giller Prize

This year's winner of the Giller Prize, Canada's most prestigious literary award, is Sean Michaels for his novel Us Conductors. The novel is based on the life of Lev Thermen, the Russian-born inventor of an electronic musical instrument called the thermin.

The thermin produces an eerie sound and is played without the performer actually touching the instrument. The musician stands in front of the thermin and moves his/her hands in the proximity of two metal antennae to control pitch and volume.

According to the Giller Award jury, Michaels "succeeds at one of the hardest things a writer can do: he makes music seem to sing from the pages of a novel."

To view the 2014 Giller short list and to read an excerpt from Michaels' novel, please see http://www.scotiabankgillerprize.ca/f....

To view a video of Lev Thermen playing this instrument, please see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5qf9....

Guilty Reading Pleasures

We all have them. The books we love to read but are embarrassed to admit are on our shelves because, well, they might not present the greatest intellectual challenges ever put down on paper. You have them, your friends have them, and now it's time for me to let you in on my guilty reading pleasures.

When I was a high school senior my English teacher liked to talk about a friend of his who was a professor of English at Trent University. Dr. Gallagher was, according to him, just an ordinary, unpretentious guy who liked to read ordinary, unpretentious stuff like murder mysteries and westerns along with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. At the time, because of my own personal reading habits, I thought he sounded like a good role model to follow.

Encouraged to be an omnivorous reader, I remember devouring a large bag of my mother's Harlequin romances out of curiosity as an undergrad at Trent. These were novels published in the 1960s, and I remember several doctor-and-nurse stories and a couple of mysterious houses and tall, handsome widowers. Already an avid fan of the highly-formulaic Doc Savage adventure series, I recognized in the Harlequins a similar dependence on well-established conventions and an even better approach to plotting. I haven't read any romances since, I must admit, but I'm very glad I took the time back then. As an aspiring writer, I learned quite a bit about basic storytelling from these books.

What I have continued to read, though, are what were referred to then as sports juveniles. As a youth I read almost every book in the Young Adults section of the public library, and the sports novels were among my favourites. As an adult I've built up a small collection of them that I regularly raid whenever I want to read something light, dependable, and fun.

These books include Junk Pitcher by Bill Knott, Rookie Running Back by Cliff Hankin, Throw the Long Bomb! by Jack Laflin, Scrubs on Skates and Boy on Defense by Scott Young, and Batter Up by Jackson Scholz, just to name a few. These books appealed to my budding sense of right and wrong, my appreciation of the difficult challenges faced by young people trying to succeed as athletes, and my love of a simple, good story, well told.

So I happily admit it! I still love to curl up with a bag of chips, a glass of juice, and one of my favourite sports juveniles. The room is quiet, my brain gurgles contentedly, and, once again, all's well with the world.

Say, it's been a while since I re-read Throw the Long Bomb! I think I'll grab that one tonight!

What about you? What are your favourite guilty reading pleasures?

Product Placement: The Future of Writing?

In a recent article entitled "The Future of Writing" in the Library Journal, the Annoyed Librarian writes tongue-in-cheek about product placement in e-books as the inevitable successor to "[t]he same type of cheesy placement that we're used to in Hollywood movies."

The Annoyed Librarian informs us that the Sweet'n Low company has invested $1.3 million in the romance novel Find Me I'm Yours to get written into the story.

Once I read this article, I started doing some research and discovered this account of the novel in CNN Money:

Find Me I'm Yours [by Hillary Carlip] follows the story of main character Mags Marclay, who goes on a scavenger hunt for her soul mate. Rather than simply read about Mags' adventures, readers are able to experience it. They can see her Instagram photos, her art, her handwritten notes and the websites she visits and creates.

Carlip, a media entrepreneur, Web designer and author, says she conceived of the idea for the multimedia story in 2010. She brought on her friend Lapiduss, a television writer and marketing executive, to help with the business part of the project.

Once they landed ad sponsors, Carlip and Lapiduss created their own production studio. They hired editors and producers for the videos and Web designers for the sites.

Five of the 33 websites are 'full-on businesses,' with advertising partners that include billboard company Clear Channel (CCO), fan fiction site WattPad and Cumberland Brands, maker of Sweet & Low.

For the full text of the Annoyed Librarian article, please see http://lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/an....

For the full text of the CNN Money online report, please see http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/03/techn....

Remembrance Day 2014

As this year's Remembrance Day ceremonies will mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, I'd like to dedicate this post to the memory of my grandfather, Harry Brook.

Born in Acton, west London, England in 1888, Harry was already a twelve-year veteran in the Middlesex Regiment of the British Army when he shipped out with the rest of the 4th Battalion as part of the British Expeditionary Force dispatched to France in 1914. Landing at Boulogne on August 14th, Harry and his comrades saw action at Mons and Le Cateau, and were dubbed by Kaiser Wilhelm as "General French's contemptible little army." Proud to be known thereafter as one of The Old Contemptibles, Harry fought at the Battle of the Marne, the Battle of the Aisne, and the First Battle of Ypres. The worst was yet to come, though -- the Battle of the Somme in 1916, one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, in which more than a million soldiers were wounded or killed.

Harry suffered a severe burn on his leg from mustard gas, a wound that never adequately healed for the rest of his life. My mother remembered him chasing her out of the kitchen when she was a little girl as he struggled to change the dressings on the wound, gritting his teeth at the pain that never went away. For his service in the Great War, he was awarded the Mons Star (with bar), the British War Medal, and the Victory Medal, which he wore proudly every Armistice Day until his passing in 1960. It was our understanding that he was last surviving member of The Old Contemptibles in Canada at the time of his death.

This week, as we remember the service of everyone who placed themselves in harm's way to defend their country and our way of life, I'm proud to salute the memory of my grandfather, Harry Brook.

The Science of Reading

While doing some research, I came across an interesting article in a back issue of Scientific American entitled "The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens". The article looks at various research conducted to determine how the brain reads paper versus electronic content. Here are some of the findings:

- attitudes towards e-reading have changed as e-readers and tablets have improved in technology (e-books make up 15 to 20 per cent of trade book sales in the US);

- recent research has found few differences between paper and electronic text in terms of our reading speed and comprehension;

- aside from lacking the "tactile" experience and pleasure of reading a paper book, e-readers do not allow us the same ability to navigate through long texts in "an intuitive and satisfying way," and may drain more of our mental resources while reading, thus making it harder to remember what we have read;

- the human brain may also "perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape". An electronic text lacks the "topography" of a paper book, which allows us to read individual pages without losing track of the whole of the book. The e-reader allows us to view a page at a time without the sense of what came before and what will follow.

The article concludes that rather than trying to replicate the features of a paper book, e-reading technology should evolve to reflect the strengths of the medium:

Why not keep paper and evolve screen-based reading into something else entirely? Screens obviously offer readers experiences that paper cannot. Scrolling may not be the ideal way to navigate a text as long and dense as Moby Dick, but the New York Times, Washington Post, ESPN and other media outlets have created beautiful, highly visual articles that depend entirely on scrolling and could not appear in print in the same way. Some Web comics and infographics turn scrolling into a strength rather than a weakness.

For the full text of the article, please see http://www.scientificamerican.com/art....

Richard Flanagan: Winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize

The Guardian reports that prior to winning the 2014 Man Booker prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Australian author Richard Flanagan was so short of money that he was considering working in Australia's northern mines. His £50,000 winnings will allow him to continue writing. In addition, sales of the novel have increased exponentially since he won the Booker prize. According to BookScan, he sold over 10,000 copies of the novel in the week following his win, as opposed to 316 copies the preceding week.

For the full text of the article, as well as survey results showing a marked decline in the earnings of authors, please see http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014....

As Flanagan notes, "Writing is a very hard life for so many writers."

The Evolution of Libraries

The Innovation and Technology Conference for Information Professionals will take place in London, England, on October 21 and 22, 2014.

Among the topics for discussion are the role of the internet in the library of the future, blueprints for change, the importance of libraries in supporting learning at all levels, and the technology and apps that will help libraries to evolve.

For the complete conference agenda, please see http://www.internet-librarian.com/201....

Librify Is Up and Running

About a year ago, I published a post on Librify, which was being developed as the "first digital social reading platform." In addition to offering discounted e-books to its members, Librify hopes to generate book discussions and to provide a forum for book clubs. It uses a "Book of the Month Club–style subscription service for one discounted e-book a month with a fully stocked e-bookstore that works across devices." It's also paired up with some heavy-hitters, including Ingram and Target.

For the text of my original post, please see https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog....

To view the Librify Facebook page, please see https://www.facebook.com/librify.

If Buildings Could Talk

There's an interesting post on the Times Literary Supplement blog regarding a project by six film-makers. Each has chosen a building and proceeded to make a 3D film uncovering the "soul" of that building. The series is entitled Cathedrals of Culture. The buildings that were chosen are the Berlin Philharmonic; the National Library of Russia; Halden Prison, Norway; the Salk Institute, California; Oslo Opera House; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The project is being led by film-maker Wim Wenders, who says the films allow viewers to be "immersed like never before into a place” and that the buildings “speak for themselves”.

For the full text of the blog post, please see http://timescolumns.typepad.com/.