Of course; sometimes; Gumshoe overdid it;
Filed under 2016, cartoon by author, CarToonsday
Never laugh at your wife’s choices. Remember, you are one of them.
***
Man walks in to a department store and tells a salesperson, “I need to get something for my wife for her birthday.”
Salesperson: “What would like to give her?”
Man: “An excuse.”
Filed under 2016, joke by author, Monday morning writing joke
‘People are hungry for real bookstores’: Judy Blume on why US indie booksellers are thriving
At 78, the multimillion-selling author has begun a new career, opening her own bookshop – and joining a business sector that’s flourishing again in the US
By Alison Flood
She might be a beloved and bestselling author of classic children’s books from Forever to Blubber, but Judy Blume says she wakes up every day “and I look to the sky, and I say, ‘whoever’s up there, I thank you for not having to write today’.”
Blume doesn’t have to write because, at 78, she has embarked on a new career: she’s an independent bookseller. Together with her husband, George Cooper, she has opened a small, nonprofit bookshop in Key West, Florida, where she’s working almost every day. And she’s loving it. She had planned “to take a gap year” after she finished writing and promoting her last novel, In the Unlikely Event. “I was going to relax and read and have this whole time with no pressure. And then bingo – the chance comes along to open a bookshop, and there you go. I guess I like that in my life … To learn something new like this, at 78, makes it all the more exciting.”
Judy Blume (left), author turned bookseller.
“We’ve done better than anyone, including Mitch, thought we could do,” says Blume, down the line from Florida. “It has been a very satisfying experience … Writing In the Unlikely Event took five years – it was very long and difficult and complicated. This is just a great change for me, and I am enjoying it so much.”
Customers, she says, “sometimes” recognise her – an author who has sold more than 80m books around the world – “and they’re completely taken aback, especially if I’m sitting there dusting the shelves. I’m pretty good at recommendations – I’m good in the kids’ department for sure. I read all the picture books when they come in. And I can lead people to what they want, although I’ve not read as many of our books as some of our volunteers [the store has two paid employees, as well as Cooper, Blume and a series of volunteers]. I’m trying really hard to keep up. It’s like Christmas every day, working here.”
Business for independent bookstores in America in general, is “going well”, Blume believes. “I just think people are so hungry for a real bookstore again. So many people live in places where there isn’t one … It’s not just us doing well. A lot of independent booksellers are.”
The figures back her up. At BookExpo America last week, the American Booksellers Association announced that for the seventh year in a row, its bookstore membership has gone up, to 1,775 members operating in 2,311 locations, up from 1,401 members operating in 1,651 locations in 2009. The lion’s share of these are independents, says the ABA: in 2015, sales for independent booksellers were up just over 10%, and are remaining strong in 2016. In the UK by contrast, the Booksellers Association recorded 894 independent bookshops in 2015, a decrease of 3% from 2014. A decade ago, there were more than 1,500.
“Independent bookselling in the US is continuing not just to grow, but to thrive,” says ABA chief executive Oren Teicher, who attributes the growth to various factors: the localism movement, “which is exploding, and we are benefiting from that”; booksellers “getting smarter at using technology”; publishers’ increasing acknowledgment that “customers discover books in bricks and mortar locations [so] our colleagues in publishing have figured out that they need bricks and mortar stores as much as we need their books”; and the growing role of the bookseller as curator, in a world flooded with new titles.
The “resurgence of print” has also helped, says Teicher. A recent report in the UK revealed that in 2015, sales of printed books were up by 0.4% to £2.76bn, while ebook sales fell for the first time in the seven years the Publishers Association has tracked them, down 1.6% to £554m in 2015. In the US, the Association of American Publishers reported last month that while overall sales for consumer books were up 0.8% to $7.2bn (£4.9bn) in 2015, ebook sales declined, down 9.5% in adult books and 43.3% in children and young adult titles.
“Five years ago in the American book business, there was a widespread panic that somehow digital reading was going to replace physical books and they would be a relic of some other time and place. Fast forward to today, and I think digital reading has levelled off and calmed down slightly. It’s going to be a piece of our business, but print books aren’t going away. We’re living in a hybrid world,” says Teicher.
Added together, these ingredients make “the recipe for our success”, says Teicher. “But there is still a very modest margin in books, and people have to work really hard. We have significant challenges before us, clouds on the horizon that could interfere with our success.”
These range from pressure on wages and rents, he says, to the “1,000lb gorilla” – the continued growth of online shopping. “But independents are extraordinarily resilient,” he says. “If I had a penny for every time we’ve been counted out, I’d be a pretty rich guy today.”
The world, beheld in a mirror.
Filed under 2016, Photo by Lauren Booker, Photo Finish Friday
Hum and chirp: dawn song. /
Bang and warble: midday refrain. /
Sigh and buzz: dusk coda.
Filed under 2016, Haiku to You Thursday, poetry by author
New Literary Agent Alert: Amanda Jain of Inklings Literary
Amanda Jain
She is seeking: historical fiction (in all genres), women’s / book club / upmarket fiction, romance (particularly historical, suspenseful, or with a comedic bent), mysteries (particularly historical or cozy, or historical cozies), and narrative nonfiction in the areas of social history, archaeology, art history, material culture, etc. She is also interested in select young adult and middle grade projects with unique hooks and a strong voice.
In all cases, what Amanda is most looking for is a story that completely immerses the reader in the world of the book. She wants to feel the sun on her shoulders, smell the smoke of the battlefield, and hear the horses galloping in the distance. Amanda is NOT the agent to query with picture books, memoirs, self-help, poetry, erotica, science fiction and fantasy, horror, or inspirational fiction.
How to submit: To e-query, type “Query (Agent Name): (Book Title)” in the subject line to query(at)inklingsliterary(dot)com. No attachments. In the body of the email, send a query letter that includes :the title, genre, and word count of your project, a brief blurb about the story, a brief bio including any publishing credits, the first 10 pages of your manuscript, and a brief synopsis (1-2 pages). “Our response time varies for queries, but the general response time is within 3 months for queries, and 4 months for manuscripts. If you have not received an answer for your query after 3 months,” the agency is not interested in the project.
Filed under 2016, writing tip, Writing Tip Wednesday
Even the sunrise looked like a comma to the folks of Run-On.
Filed under 2016, cartoon by author, CarToonsday
Three candidates for a position in a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing were sitting on a bench, each looking at the comments made on his writing sample used as part of the application.
First student: “Mine says I would be better suited to writing user’s manuals for consumer products than creative writing.”
Second student: “Mine says, ‘The convolution of your writing is such that one can only assume that you would better suited for a position at the bar than in the MFA program.”
First student: “I hope they meant law school.”
They both chuckled then turned to the third student. Finally, the second student asked: “What did you yours say?”
Third student: Mine says that ‘from your writing sample we can only assume that English must be your second language and that you have only taken it up recently.’”
“Wow!” said the first and second students in unison.
“Yeah,” said the third student, “and to think I plagiarized from Nabokov.”
Filed under 2016, Monday morning writing joke
Google & The Black List offer $15,000 for scripts focused on Computer Science
http://deadline.com/2016/04/google-the-black-list-script-grants-computer-science-1201740858/
and
http://www.projectcasting.com/jobs/google-black-list?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=SocialWarfare
Google, the online giant, is partnering with The Black List to offer financial grants in support of developing scripts centered on changing the image of computer science and computer scientists in pop culture. The submission process begins today and runs through July 15.
Beginning in the fall, the script site will grant up to $15K to three screenwriters — one feature and two episodic pilots — as they work to craft their scripts over a six-month period. At the end, each writer will present their work to Google and address how the grant was used to advance the projects. Writers will retain all rights to the work. Writers with scripts on The Black List site are also eligible.
This project is part of an initiative from Google’s Computer Science Education in Media program to encourage and inspire young people, especially girls and minorities — who historically have been underrepresented in the field — to not only use technology but also to create it.
Google would like to see if there were more movies about computer sciences that weren’t the stereotypical nerd movie. Are you an aspiring screenwriter? Do you want to work for Google? If so, Google will actually pay you to write a movie script.
The woman who is trying to create a Netflix for books
By Neelam Raaj
Chiki Sarkar hates being called a disruptor but that’s exactly what she’s doing to the opaque, incestuous world of Indian publishing. Along with Durga Raghunath, who brings the digital smarts, Sarkar has co-founded Juggernaut, a digital publishing house. She spoke to Neelam Raaj on why she wants to use tech to give dead-tree books a new lease of life.
You’re pitching Juggernaut as India’s first phone publisher. Did you have to rethink the book for the small screen?
When the idea of Juggernaut first came to me in December 2014, I thought about what the phone can do that the book can’t, and I thought Sunny Leone – delicious stories on the screen. But we’re also turning her stories into a physical book. The idea is – Can the physical and digital talk to each other? Can I take the knowledge of who is going to buy our books on the phone and sell them other books?
Sunny will be appointment reading – one story on your mobile at 10pm every night for a week. But there’s a range of reading on the app, including short works of non-fiction, long serialized forms, and a set of short stories that you can buy one of. The cost will be around half of a physical book’s.
What will be your physical vs digital mix?
If we bring 100 books to digital, about 30 or 40 of those will have physical copies too. It will depend mostly on the book and the writer. When we publish authors Arundhati Roy, Prashant Kishore, Twinkle Khanna, Svetlana Alexievich, we’ll publish both physical and digital. But young authors will be tried and tested on digital first. On the phone, we think, people will come for areas around love, sex and romance – stuff you want privacy for. Crime and fantasy tend to naturally move to electronic so it will be a big part of our list. And there’s always going to be a big component of celebrities. Also, I think the only way to get great books in India is to make them up – I did that in Penguin (she was editor-in-chief) too. For instance, I knew I wanted a book on Aarushi so I went in search of a writer.
Do you see yourself as a disruptor in publishing?
I hate this word. Like any other publisher, I think of only one thing – how can I sell more books? Physical books will never die but can I add another way of thinking about publishing books, and can I use it to get more people to read more of my physical list? I’d be very happy if my physical sales go up because of digital.
But I’ll admit I have become increasingly impatient with the status quo. I’m 38, and not 60. I don’t want to be a copout. India is full of people who have good ideas and are following them. Thirty years down the line, I would kick myself silly if I didn’t do this.
Why would an author publish with Juggernaut and not self-publish with Amazon?
The question you should be asking is: why is an author coming to me and not, say a Penguin, Harper or a Picador? We’re not competing with Amazon; we’re a traditional publisher who is asking interesting questions about digital.
How did you get Sunny Leone to write erotica?
We wanted her to write on sex. She told us, ‘Look I don’t want to go all the way erotic. I’ll be sexy, but not pornographic.’ So we kept Fifty Shades of Grey as a marker but we wanted the stories to be empowering for women.
Her stories have a wife asking her husband for sex and being turned down; an overweight girl who fancies a guy who ignores her but things change when she loses weight, and then she changes her mind too.
What is more exciting now – Indian fiction or non-fiction?
Non-fiction, and it’s been that way for the last 6-7 years. We’re in that stage in the life of the country that we want to tell stories about ourselves. The more interesting fiction is coming from Indian languages, Gujarati, Marathi and Tamil.
Filed under 2016, books, e-book, ebook publishing
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