by Cindy Orr
This week’s scan results
It’s definitely true that people who aren’t in the book business usually have no idea which publisher is responsible for any particular book, at least for large publishers (except maybe Harlequin), but the story can be very different for independent presses, who can spur sales by keeping to a niche.
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The physical process of reading turns out to be surprisingly different than scientists thought. A new study shows that each eye reads part of a word and the brain fuses the images together.
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Just another celebrity “author” phenomenon: Publishers Weekly says it’s tough for food writers to get published if they don’t have their own TV show. Darn, guess you’d better put away that manuscript and try out for The Next Food Network Star.
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Books for free? And everyone from author to publisher gets paid? Maybe so. How?
How else: advertising. They’re already trying it in Shanghai.
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Here’s a cool idea. Eco-Libris: balance out the books you read by planting trees.
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Lisa Adams and John Heath, the authors of Why We Read What We Read appeared on the Diane Rehm show and gave several reasons for why Americans like to read what’s on the bestseller lists. Among them:
Americans like happy endings and simplistic solutions.
Americans read for plot and character and don’t care at all about literary value.
A scientific study has found that preschoolers are able to get into the minds of characters in stories. Until this study, scientists did not believe that children so young could empathize with characters. But previous studies concentrated on how well children could tell a story. This one focused on how well they could comprehend a story, and the results were surprising (to some).
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And speaking of empathy, here’s a roundtable discussion among several well known Canadian authors on empathy in fiction.
Mashable has listed 50 Sites for Booklovers. Unfortunately, included are places to get your book self-published.
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Here are the Ten Greatest Fictional Travelers. Think Gulliver is on there?
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And here’s Ricklibrarian’s Helpful Hint for Selectors. It’s so simple you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it.
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Thanks to Linda Richards, we have the interesting fact that September 15 is the birthday of Agatha Christie, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert McCloskey, Robert Benchley and La Rochefoucauld.
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Joan Didion and Terry Gross are set to win National Book Award medals.
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We’ll close this week with a thought from John Sutherland, the author of How to Read a Novel. Sutherland says that with so many novels being published each year, our “must-read archive gets bigger and bigger. Bestseller lists used to contain ten titles. Now it’s up to a hundred. It’s like a mountain which grows faster than any reader can climb.” And we haven’t learned to read any faster. Most of us would be lucky to read 1,000 novels in our lives. So making the right choices is the most important thing.
Blogger Max Magee over at The Millions has an approach that works for him: “I alphabetize my TBR pile by author and then assign each book a number. When the time comes to pick my next book to read, I use a random number generator to decide for me. I know, it’s impossibly nerdy, but I’ve decided I like handling my reading decisions this way.” No word on how books he chooses books to place on the To Be Read shelf, though.
And that’s at least two more reasons why we need good Readers’ Advisors, right?
So long until next week.
Dead link to artsjournal.com (for more reasons why Americans read bestsellers).