And then there was the time iTunes featured our podcast in the “New and Noteworthy” section on its homepage. Listen to the latest episode here.
“Stopping was death. Stopping meant you’d given up and turned the keys of the world over to other people. The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.”
—Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
I hope you have a book like this, a book that makes you feel sane when other forces conspire to loosen your bearings, a book that values what you value, a book that makes you laugh and nod and gives you comfort. If you think that books don’t have the power to confer validation upon their readers, then I’m afraid we’ve had very different experiences. Because although of course validation comes from a dozen other places in my life, books have their own way of reaching those hard to scratch places right in the middle of my soul (sometimes when I don’t even know that there’s a place in need of a scratch) in a way few other things can. They are intensely personal in this way, these books, and one that speaks to me with power and clarity might sound tinny and distant to you. This exclusivity is one of the reasons they’re so powerful: it sometimes feels as though they were written with us in mind.
At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.
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| — | Alberto Manguel (via thelifeofabookjunky) |
Critical Linking: May 21, 2013
Our daily round-up of bookish links. Tastes great with coffee.
The only type of paid review that Amazon supports is an editorial review. An editorial review is a more formal evaluation of a book usually written by an editor or expert within a genre, but can also be written by family and friends. If you have received an editorial review of your book that you’d like to post to the Editorial Review section of your book’s detail page, please visit our Author Central Help Page.
This is a weird little part of Amazon’s review policy. Editorial reviews written by family and friends can be submitted for the editorial review section, but are not allowed in the customer review section. Odd.
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The publisher suggests that customers pay $10 for the download, but there is a drop down option to pay other amounts including: nothing, $2, $5, $25, $50 or $100.
Brave. Hope it works out for them.
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“[T]he launch of the pay model is the most important and most successful business decision made by The New York Times in many years. We have around 700,000 paid digital subscribers across the company’s products so far and a new nine-figure revenue stream that is still growing.”
Gotta ask yourself, though, how many other successful business decisions has the NYT made recently. Still, good for them.
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Amis is one of the finest stylists alive, but I thought “Lionel Asbo” was a bad novel. A really bad novel. In fact, my review of “Lionel Asbo” was a finalist for the Hatchet Job — a prize given for the most negative book review of the year. And yet, on the new paperback — on thefront cover, no less — appears this ringing endorsement from The Washington Post: “Amis is a force unto himself… . There is, quite simply, no one else like him.”
All true. But caveat emptor. That line is drawn from a review of “London Fields” that my colleague Jonathan Yardley wrote … 23 years ago.
This is pretty embarrassing stuff from the publisher.
4 days and just a little over $5K left to go in our Kickstarter to publish START HERE, Vol. 2! Back it or bust.
