Monday, July 30, 2007

Links About Town

Sorry for the radio silence. I’ve got two lovely notebooks full of notes just waiting to be turned into columns on the publishing industry. The Institute continues to be wonderful, but just so you don’t get the impression that I’ve been slacking here are a few links involving me, things of interest, and frequent commenters here at BS.

Proof of my non-slacker status:

My column “The Proper Care and Feeding of Booksellers (and How It Can Work for You)” is up over at Romancing the Blog. The column is not genre specific (for those of you who break out in hives at the thought of being called Romance) and continues my campaign to get authors to bring food when bribing booksellers.

My review of 13 Little Blue Envelopes, a young adult novel by Maureen Johnson, is up at Paperback Reader.

Things of Interest:

Booksquare has a very interesting column up called, “The World is Not Flat,” in which she discusses the theories raised by Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur. Booksquare focuses mainly on Keen’s argument that “Keen’s primary argument seems to be that the Web 2.0 revolution is destroying the guardians of Old Media,” and whether or not this is a bad thing. I find the discussion interesting when compared with the comments Scott Manning, of Scott Manning and Associates, made when he taught our class on publicity. Among other points, he talked about the blending of New Media and Old, and how the best publicity campaigns use both to build momentum. Newspapers pick up internet trends, publicists use the internet to target their niche markets and forward on print articles, and discussions evolve from both forms in both forms. Thoughts?

Since I’ve posted a link to a review, it seems only right to also link to Book/Daddy as he highlights Gail Pool’s book, Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America. An example of Web 2.0 examining print without bloodshed.

And in the realm of completely random (when compared to the previous topics under this heading), Bookshelves of Doom has been designing bags featuring old book covers. Let it be the ultimate of your library/bookshopping accessories. I know a couple of people I would buy the Doctor Who bag for.

Cool, non-slacking frequent commenter topics:

Marta Acosta will be hosting an interview with those Smart Bitches Candy and Sarah later today, and among other things they’ll be discussing “blog vs. print reviewers, romance and genre fiction, gender in writing, [and] their feelings about humor.” A wide range of topics for all.

The Written Nerd continues to outline her dream bookstore, and I must say I love her vision. Brooklyn will be lucky to have it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Loved your "Care and Feeding" article! That's the BSC we know and love, and have been missing! Just so long as you're picking up lots of good stuff down there, and promise to share it with all of us in your usual entertaining fashion, we'll wait patiently for your return. :o)