Raconteurs’ Rousing Writing-Related Roundup!
A handful of great reads on the blogosphere right now if you are an aspiring writer or just care about the state of the book industry.
The best read of the week, however, goes to Elle Casey, who discusses the state of the publishing industry with an agent. It is one of the great reads on the subject of publishing right now. I liken it to a buggy-whip maker scratching their head and listening to Henry Ford go on and on about some strange new invention of his. The essence of a shifting tide is seen right here, folks. A must-read.
Finally, Anne R. Allen discusses the bizarre world of book reviews. Everything about this post screams the need for all of us to review the works we read. The only way to drown out the noise is with a chorus of honest voices. Making this difficult is the new policy whereby authors can’t review books. That’s a bind when more and more readers are becoming authors!
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Can't review books if you're an author? Review bullies? Ah, sounds like the real world creeping into the online world. I firmly believe that we need to be able to filter the garbage out. Goodreads helps by showing your friends first. I wonder if amazon might eventually allow a trust button to be used that says show me reviews from this kind of person mid guess that within a few days or weeks they would know who the rats were based on the linkings.
You're being your usual classy self about The Guardian piece, so let me stick my foot further in my mouth, and say that although the piece was a big improvement in tone from Ewan Morrison's pieces a year ago, I wish they wouldn't call it a review. It's an advance press piece by a trade reporter that summarizes the first two sections and recaps the unique reader-supported, serialized process that brought Wool forth. In terms of literary analysis, it doesn't offer much. There's this sweeping statement about dystopian fiction that isn't true: "A great pleasure of dystopian fiction is the reader's excess of knowledge: we know what the world used to be, and watch characters struggle towards the truth." In much dystopian fiction, characters experience or cause the fall, or certainly know its history.
An interesting spoiler-free discussion about the series' themes of hope, human potential, control of information, and power could have been had, but instead we get some unsubstantiated, vague, condescending (and not extremely good or useful) advice about "tightness" of writing, the quoting of a character's poetry out of context that misleads about the quality of your prose, and then a hopeful sentence about "the next one..." you mean the new Wool book just finished, or the two that have already been published?
Sorry to be so sour, this made me kind of upset! I guess I'm a fan. :)
Edmund White, in his wonderful New York memoir City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s, spoke in past tense about The New York Times Book Review and its influence. This actually makes me sad, because I think that there is so much value in professionalism. But single data point criticism, in such a subjective area, is kind of insane when you think about it.
Kakutani, Ron Charles, James Wood, et al., if you are smart, you will beg your corporate overlords to let you syndicate your reviews on Goodreads now.
I believe that a lot of the problems with the new user-generated systems, including Amazon's, are transitional. I don't worry too much about individual behavior, and just concentrate on adding value into the system in the small ways that I can. Lately, I've been spending my breakfast and lunch hours roaming Goodreads on my iPad and liking the best reviews that I see.
I also wanted to add that The Guardian's review of Wool Omnibus... did she read the same book as me? She didn't seem very well versed in the genre.