“Here’s the thing, I love fanfiction. I think it’s often a great supplement to the original work. It’s a great way to gain camaraderie in a fandom, to see the trends of what is and isn’t popular. And it’s a way to get what you want while still respecting canon.
And there is good fanfiction. Wide Sargasso Sea is a wonderful book. It is also total fanfiction. It’s Jane Eyre, but from Bertha’s perspective. And it’s awesome. And in 2006, the Pulitzer prize winner for fiction was a novel called March. Which is, as you may have guessed, Little Women from Mr. March’s POV.
So why is it that this Amazon promise of royalties puts such a pit in my stomach?”
— Amazon Introduces “Kindle Worlds,” Will Sell Fanfiction
Stephen Colbert has a book club! We have ideas about the books he should pick next.
Amazon Publishing announces Kindle Worlds, the first commercial publishing platform that will enable any writer to create fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters and earn royalties for doing so.
Someone is going to unlock all the potential of fan fiction. Amazon has the pull to do it, but do they get the ethos of fan fiction? We’ll see, I guess.
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And so it behooves us as authors of all shapes and designations and genital configurations (oh and I’m talking to you, too, publishers, if you’ll listen) to look deep into the hearts of our stories and to see if we’re leaning on lazy archetypes, stereotypes, conventions, historical myths or outright buckets of bullshit.
And I would guess nearly all of us are.
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Bestselling author Dan Brown has told fans he knows “exactly what [he] is writing next”, and that he has a locations in mind that “fall into Robert Langdon territory”—though he stopped short of confirming his next book will also feature his famous professor of symbology.
Even his real-life cliffhangers are pretty obvious (and fun).
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A first edition copy of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” that contains author J.K. Rowling’s notes and original illustrations fetched 150,000 pounds ($228,000) at a London auction on Tuesday.
Gatsby vs. Gatsby: A Comparison of the 1974 Film and Baz Luhrmann’s Adaptation
[video]
“The (Fill in the Blank)’s Wife/Daughter
Why are you pushing that feminist soapbox toward me? Why are you lifting it up and forcing me to stand on top of it? I don’t need to yell about how annoying it is for the central female character to be defined in the title of the story by the primary male figure in her life! I would much rather rant about how I hate how derivative and overused this type of title is! Get me my “I hate all things derivative” soapbox!
Also, this kind of title feels like book club bait. Probably because it IS book club bait. But still. Turn down the volume on the obvious, dudes.”
— 4 Types of Book Titles I’m Totally Over
What Your Reading Rules Reveal About Your Personality
“I can’t specify what exactly prompted the urge to purge. I think it was a combination of spring cleaning momentum, getting tired of dusting all these cheap Target book shelves, getting tired of constantly trying to teach my toddlers not to rip covers off my paperbacks, plain old fashioned running out of room, and…(gasp) reading more and more books from the library on my ereader.
So, I girded my loins and began pulling out every single book that I had no plans to re-read, and every book in my TBR pile that had been there longer than two years.”
— The Great Book Purge of 2013
Those are books in the containers! This community library in France makes it almost like books grow on trees.
Girls, not boys, in all three countries received more time from parents on three activities: reading, storytelling, and teaching letters and numbers.
Maybe boys aren’t as interested, and so the interest isn’t reinforced? Too squirrelly to keep still? Huh.
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Ebook besteller lists will now appear only online, not in print. The reasoning behind this is a bit more tenuous, given the documented overlap between print and digital readers. Heavy readers, the kind likely to bother even glancing at bestseller lists, are reading in both formats. The real thought steering this might be that the digital bestsellers are so driven by pricing whims—99 cent ebooks feature heavily—that they have little bearing on literary culture outside of those lists.
What a strange decision.
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Looking to transform Hollywood’s pile of unproduced scripts into publishable e-books, James West, a motion-picture industry entrepreneur, has launched Script Lit. The company licenses optioned, but never produced, scripts, to turn them into commercial fiction.
Fascinating idea. Some of the best storytellers in the world are working in film, but only a very small percentage of their work gets produced (and often for reasons totally separate from the quality of the story). Turning those stories into good books, though…..not that easy.
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Australia’s Qantas Airlines is promoting the announcement of its extended flight routes by commissioning a series of books that last exactly as long as each flight.
You know if Infinite Jest is waiting there on your seat for ya, you’ve got a ways to go.