Same Product, New and Improved Packaging

The whole Opal Metha affair came to a close (physically at least) for my store on Friday when we got the notice that Little, Brown was recalling all copies. Sometime next week they’ll find their way back to the distribution center and from there, I assume, they’ll go to be pulped. This unprecedented action is covered much more thoroughly (with many nifty links) at GalleyCat, but I really don’t think that most readers noticed, which is interesting to me for several reasons.

With the Frey incident I had customers coming and buying the book because they wanted to read the lies, I had others who wanted to read it because he “felled” the great and mighty Oprah, and still others that just heard it was a good book and didn’t care about the scandal. Sales of A Million Little Pieces actually got better for us once the scandal broke, pulling in all those people who avoid Oprah and all that she stands for (Or as I call them, the Franzens). We sold through our old copies waiting for the new printing with the apology letter from Frey and his publisher. To this day I have customers who come in looking for the book because their best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s cousin said it was the greatest.

Opal Metha’s sales did not increase (at my store at least) when the scandal broke, and until that point the sales had been less than stellar. One could blame the “demise” of Chick Lit for this, or bad product placement, or the fact that Opal’s author was trying to get through her second year at Harvard and couldn’t make the author rounds, but I think the answer lies elsewhere.

I was talking to my boss the other day and she admitted that in the beginning, she wondered if the scandal was being blown out of proportion, “There’s a commonality in the teenage experience,” and that it was only after reading the side by side comparisons provided by the Crimson and other publications that she was convinced that plagiarism took place. Furthermore it didn’t seem that Opal’s ethnicity added anything other to the experience (granted she hadn’t read the book, nor have I, so if it does indeed add something please let us know) unlike it did to Gurinder Chahda’s character Jesminder in the movie Bend it Like Beckham. Beckham became a sleeper hit because not only did it have an attractive cast, but it enlarged on the teenage experience of social and parental pressure by introducing the ethnic and religious element. Even if Little, Brown does release a new edition of Opal, I don’t think that it will achieve any measure of success (other than those who will buy it to compare to the original version, and even then they’ll probably wait until the paperback edition) that Beckham did because Opal has nothing new to add. It was the same ol’ same ol in a new, pretty pink cover.

If you have nothing new then you’ve got no legs to stand on in the book market beyond the first flash of being the hot precie on the scene. The Written Nerd has covered the topic of long legs (books that continue to sell and sell and sell some more long after their release date) much more eloquently than I, and I’ll only add that everyone from the smallest independent to the largest chain to the publisher itself relies on the backlist books to keep them afloat.

Those shiny, frontlist hardcovers just aren’t selling as well as they used to (especially with the cost of gas these days, goodbye disposable income, hello cheaper book), while trades remain steady (and lately I’ve noticed a bump in mass market sales, along with more bitching about the premium paperbacks). If Little, Brown does decide to go ahead and re-release Opal, their best bet would be to a paperback edition, and they need to make the changes and get the book out soon. In a couple of months I’m not sure that even the best publicity team could get the literary world excited in once again reading about the teenage experience.

After all, they all lived it at some point.

Perhaps Viswanathan’s best choice would be to write a memoir from this whole experience. Seventeen year old, Harvard accepted plagiarizer caught up in the publishing and packaging world from her point of view? Sounds like it could be a hit to me as long as someone made sure the words were all her own.

She could even publish it through Talese/Doubleday.

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist).

Phoning it in...

A friend and I were having a conversation about a certain comic artist's new work, and the friend said that it was widely believed that the artist was just "phoning it in."

Not really trying.

I feel like I've been phoning it in this week, not because y'all aren't worth the effort, but because I just haven't had the time (and tired when the time was available). Apologies to those of you who've been putting up with me for awhile, and for any of the new folk that have stopped by, this really is a place of books and book learning.

Now that I have admitted said phoning in, however, I feel no guilt by doing this:

You should really go read SB Sarah's column (and the comment section) on the whole Opal Metha fiasco. She says what I meant to say and says it well.

(Here's an article on Alloy/17th involvement according to the NYT)

You should also check out this article on fanfic (if the links still work), the writing process, and how we should all just get along. (Diana provides some other links here as well.)

Go forth, discuss, and I'll try to be better tomorrow!

Bloovies? Movoks?

How do you feel about:

• books to movies?
• adapted books from movies (ie the novelizations of (blank) screenplay)?
• books adapted from TV shows?
• and the fact that there are now Bones books out, which is a TV show inspired by the life of Kathy Reichs who writes books about an anthropologist that solves crimes? (Art imitates life that imitates art that...)

I would answer these too but I must go to work where there is no internet connection.

Look forward to your thoughts?

Your Strawberry Lemon Drop

Thank you to everyone who commented on Ms. Librarian’s question, and congrats to those who posted for the first time (may you continue to post without the chocolate bribery). We have two winnahs (drawn in the completely cheat free process of me writing all of your names on the back of an old shopping list, cutting out said names, folding them, and drawing the winners from a canister I got at a baby shower), so Molly and Martha Brockenbrough need to email me at the address in the sidebar so I can some place to send your prizes (if you wondered, Molly you were body wash and Martha, you were jasmine rice/wasabi). If you are allergic to chocolate then please let me know and I’ll find a suitable substitute.

I would love to do some sort of contest like this biweekly or monthly. Ideally I would like to do it with books as prizes, a way to get authors’ novels out there to help spread the word. Maybe some sort of “win it before you can buy it” with an ARC? I don’t know. I’m just stream of consciousness typing this, really. Basically I just like the idea of rewarding those of you who aren’t afraid to put your thoughts out there.

In other news, the whole Kaavya Viswanathan story has been covered all over the place to be sure, but I found this article at GalleyCat that makes a good point. The packagers at Alloy should have noticed something was up, especially if they are in the business of teen literature. Does that make her any less guilty? No, but I would like to see why no one caught his before, McCafferty’s books are considered some of the front runners in the teen queen chick lit arena, so don’t tell me that no one at Alloy has read them.

If you’re a fan of comic books, specifically Frank Miller’s work (but you haven’t been too impressed with his later stuff), then you might want to check out this link (snagged from Meljean). A fantastic take on the T and A concept only with male characters.

And if you’re in to fantasy then you might want to check out the reviews for Naomi Novik’s first two books (in a trilogy) over at Dear Author.com which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite sites.

And finally, when we weren’t amusing ourselves with this (and it provided hours of amusement due to the fact that we work in a mall and all of those people where there!), I won mucho bookseller points today by figuring that when my customer was asking about that “Greek book” about “building civilization” what he really meant was Sailing the Wine Dark Sea by Thomas Cahill. Thus proving that giving up my early childhood memories so that I could remember book titles was a good choice.

There was more that I wanted to share, I’m sure, but the lemony-strawberry-alcoholic goodness has caught up to me and it is now time for bed. Goodnight and Sweet Dreams.

Questions! Contests! Exclamation points!

ETA: Comments now closed so I can draw a name.

Yesterday when Blogger was being eeeeeevil, Ms. Librarian emailed me this question (as she could not simply post a comment), which I decided to use to help kick off a contest:

Apropos of nothing in particular, do you find yourself more protective of what you read as you get older? (I'm not sure I'm putting this well ...) For example, I find that I can no longer read anything in which an animal is abused or killed, even as a minor plot point. I used to be able to tell myself that such an event was illustrative of the evil of the villain, or whatever, but now, it just doesn't matter -- I won't read it, and if such a thing occurs after I've started a book, I quit the book right there. Is that weird? I also find that I don't put up with depressing books anymore. If it doesn't make me feel positive, I quit reading it. Maybe it's just that I feel like "been there, done that" and I don't want to waste any of my diminishing reading time on that sort of thing.

What do you think?

I don’t think it’s weird at all. Now we’ve covered this a bit before in “Book Therapy: Taking Your Place on the Couch,” but it deserves to be revisited. As I mentioned there that I cannot read books where a dog dies. I just can’t. I’m apparently fine when it comes to any other animal dying, something I didn’t realize until this weekend when I finished a book where a horse is put down. Now I desperately wanted a horse when I was five up until “the conversation” with my father (and I have to say, doing a cost analysis to convince your five year old that a horse just cannot happen is wrong, Dad, just wrong), and I’ve grown up around horses all my life, but the horse dying in this story fit. It advanced the plot. It gave the moment emotional impact and wasn’t something that just happened only to be forgotten a few minutes later. Had the death been for pure shock value I would have laid the book down and never come back.

As I get older I find that I’m more open to reading new genres than I was as a kid. Sure I was voracious reader even then, but I was pretty single-minded about it. It had to be something I could get my hands on, and more often than not I was drawn more to historical than scifi elements. Now, perhaps due to my job, I jump from genres to nonfiction and back again. I enjoy the diversity of the worlds that books can bring.

Sadly I have far less time to read.

“But where is the contest in all of this?” you ask. “I was promised a contest and quite possibly some chocolate.”

It’s simple. To enter this contest all you have to do is comment on Ms. Librarian’s question. Are you a more adventurous reader now or less? How have your reading likes and dislikes changed? What do you read now that you would never pick up when you were younger?

I’ll take all the names from the comments (including the anonymous ones, but please do something to differentiate yourself. Remember, you can always use your stripper name (the name of your first pet and a street you lived on), or your soap opera name (your middle name and the name of your grade school) if anonymity is important to you), and pick a name or two to win. Depending on how many people comment I might do this a couple of times this week. I don’t know. The prizes might be chocolate, or it might be a book, but it will be something worthy of putting your thoughts in a box and hitting publish.

I want this to be an open place where everyone feels comfortable commenting, and if that means offering a reward then so be it.

Comment away! You’ve got until I post the next post to make yourself heard.

Who knows if this will post...

I tried posting earlier, but it was eaten. My brilliance disappeared into the blogger void never to be seen again.

World Peace? I'd found the answer.

Hoffa's burial place? Well, y'all already knew that one, but I did have the exact coordinates for the alien invasion (along with a handy little map to all the safe zones).

The meaning of life? There too.

Sadly all of that was lost to the Blogger monster and I cannot recall the answers due to this strange degenerative brain disorder I've developed called "Oooh, pretty sun." It's been known to manifest itself in unusually wet areas when suddenly a large, glowing orb appears along with something called blue sky. Victims are helpless to fight against the symptoms and only time--and a tolerance caused by further exposure--can help mental capacity return.

At least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

So there will be no Smart Bitches today. Y'all can be both smart and bitchy on your own (I know you can). I doubt there will be any dumb bitching too, as I'm not sure I'm capable of bitchery. You see, despite needing to build up my tolerance to this thing called the "sun" I spent quite a bit of my afternoon sitting on my couch reading a book. An ARC from Christine Fletcher's publicist to be exact.

An ARC that I spent the last five pages of getting all teary eyed over, which had very little to do with hormones, but quite a bit with the idea of growing up and growing beyond.

An ARC that now has me considering the nature of endings, beginnings, and what it really means to fall and then catch ourselves.

I think, however, that this contemplative state would be better served by some vitamin D. Let's just hope that my brain is done deteriorating enough that I'll remember the answers to these questions, otherwise you'll be subjected to more incoherent rambling to be sure.

P.S. Tomorrow, I'm thinking some sort of contest/prize thing. Don't know what the prizes will be, but rumor has it that the chocolate from last contest went over well.

Gorgeous Day = Good Reading

The sun is out, it's supposed to be reasonably warm, and if I didn't need to go to work and a baby shower today I would be out enjoying it. So go make yourself some ice tea, pack a little snack, and head out to your nearest park (after a quick detour to your favorite bookstore, if necessary).

If it's not sunny where you are, grab a blanket, a cup of tea/coffee and curl up on the couch.

Your bookseller prescribes at least one hour of reading (light and fluffy or dark and gloomy, your choice) to help balance what little sanity that any of us have left.

On Getting Away With Murder

Rosina has a way of making me think with her posts, which is probably a sign that she was an excellent professor. Last night, however, I was blog-hopping just to get tired enough to go to sleep, and instead (when I finally went to bed) my mind was filled with ideas and opinions. The trigger was a very interesting post she has on the artificial lines between literary fiction and genre fiction in which she says:

“There are some writers out there who are unapologetically not-literary-genre-focused and who are both commercially and critically successful. Burke is one of them. Elmore Leonard is another. Both of them write crime fiction, and both are very good at what they do. They deserve general praise and love and lots of readers. But I'm busy wondering how that happens. Why are some authors who write outside the literary genre spared the sneering of the crit-literati? Is it that some genres are lifted into the realm of literature over time? Think of the first big immigration waves from Ireland and Italy, and the discrimination those people had to deal with. Within a couple generations they were running city hall and giving fancy balls. With enough time they lifted themselves into the higher society and took their turns sneering at the new immigrants.

Is the crime genre like that? Has it been around so long that it's been subsumed into literati land? Any ideas?”

My answer to this is that it has nothing to do with time and everything to do with the nature of our acceptance of death and murder over sex and fantasy even when it is contrary to our own laws.

When I was in high school we did several plays a year, and inevitably anytime a play had a character of a sexualized nature (prostitute, courtesan, woman/man in an affair) someone would explain. We did A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and we had several people complain that the high school girls playing the courtesans would get ideas. They would become prostitutes themselves. Never mind that the ancient Greek definition of courtesan had little to no resemblance to the chickie swinging her leather-clad behind down Burnside, who cares that many courtesans in ancient Greece became wives; we were doomed to be whores. These same people had absolutely no problem with a play where two old women kill old men to put them out of their misery (Arsenic and Old Lace), and were not afraid to congratulate us on our performances and choosing to do something better than one of those sex plays.

Why? One could argue that Arsenic and Old Lace is funny, and the humor negates the heinousness of the murder act, but it would have been the same if we’d done a serious play involving the same topic. Burke, Leonard, Lehane and others are all excellent writers (don’t get me wrong, I love these guys), and that allows them to avoid the criterati (as they shall now be known), but it also helps that murder and violence is pervasive and accepted in our society.

An eye for an eye, mercy killings, gang violence, murder/suicides, murder rampage: all accepted terms that make it on the daily news and on the paper. We talk about murder. We dissect why the preacher’s wife killed her husband, who killed Jon Benet, and what about that bloody glove? We’re asked daily what we would do to protect our families and ourselves. And we all have that moments in the office or at home or in the car when we think, “I’ll set the building on fire…”

It doesn’t matter that the characters may be more gray than black and white (because that’s what Burke, Leonard and Lehane give us) because the nature of murder is very gray. Was it a mercy killing or straight homicide? Vigilante or man looking for revenge?

Was it justified?

The very fact that we have terms like justifiable homicide and self-defense which allow murder and death to occupy a level of realism and acceptance in the literary world and in the real one. Sex is dirty, wrong, only between a husband and wife, or a man and a woman, or only for procreation (insert your qualifier here), and you certainly don’t talk about it, you hussy (which if you follow the entomology originally meant housewife). Fantasy and sci-fi are made up, it can’t/hasn’t happened, it’s not real. Murder and death are solid and not only in your book, but on the television, in the paper and down the street where the yellow crime scene tape is waving like a flag.

Agree?

Disagree?

Think I should have just hijacked Rosina’s comment section and done something else here?

I want to hear your thoughts because I have more of my own, but I don’t have time to write a really in-depth piece right now.