The cream ought to rise
September 8, 2009
In a market where publishers are putting out fewer and fewer books (down 3.2 percent to just about 275,000 titles in 2008), the best writing ought to rise to the top, right? That is, if publishers have tighter budgets, editors ought to have less discretionary money for the long shot, and the best writing ought to burst forth from the slush pile. Personally, I think the literary marketplace should be contracting a lot more than it already has. There’s far too much white noise out there for great new voices to shout through.
Then today, on the, well, Today Show, the penultimate marketing position for authors (just behind Oprah, and don’t get me started there), we see my former Governor, Rod Blagojevich, making an ass out of himself and going against pretty much every bit of legal advice he’s been given. So what does this mean for the literary marketplace?
Nothing much.
After all, some turds float to the top, too.
Pirated eBooks?
September 4, 2009
The Christian Science Monitor’s Marjorie Kehe has put together a list of the top 10 pirated eBooks (e-books? Ebooks?) of 2009.
It seems like most people are downloading what they’re too embarrassed to buy.
Don’t look at this list if you want to believe that the Internet is feeding a hunger for a deeper kind of learning. The 10 books most downloaded on BitTorrent (a free file-sharing application) this year do not include titles by Victor Hugo or Emily Brontë (or even Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling).
Instead, with the exception of Leonardo da Vinci and Stephenie Meyer, they mostly focus on either self-help or sex (or in the case of a couple of titles, both).
