Mark Charan Newton

From the Guardian.

When we look at a book, its cover tells us what to expect. A pink paperback featuring a smiling young woman is most likely a female-centric summer read, whereas a gun on a black background is probably a murder story. A few simple aesthetic rules narrow our options, make life easier and ensure none of us has to wander Waterstone’s for hours, wailing in confusion. And yet the rules seem to be changing. Having cottoned on to the fact that chick lit books sell like cupcakes, publishers are now adding chick lit-style covers to any book written by a woman whether it fits the genre definition or not… books aimed at women are becoming increasingly homogenised, girly and bland-looking.

The first comment on the post sums it up for me: “It’s very simple, really. If women refused to buy books with patronising covers, the publishers would soon change their tune.”

True. Publishers respond to what sells, and try to capture the sales of popular books by making theirs look similar. And why wouldn’t you? You’re a business, after all. If customers don’t buy them, they won’t do it again. Otherwise, is it such a bad thing for an author if more people read their books because the cover is a particular pastel shade which doesn’t sit well with you?

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Took me ages to find this graph. I remember studying data from sources like ice-cores sediment at university. Now, I occasionally subscribe to theories of ol’ Friedman, but that does not mean I deny things like this:

Source: IPCC, Working group I, Summary for Policy Makers (SPM), Third Assessment Report (TAR), page 3.

Guess I should read up.

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“On Going Back To The Street After Viewing An Art Show”
by Charles Bukowski

they talk down through
the centuries to us,
and this we need more and more,
the statues and paintings
in midnight age
as we go along
holding dead hands.

and we would say
rather than delude the knowing:
a damn good show,
but hardly enough for a horse to eat,
and out on the sunshine street where
eyes are dabbled in metazoan faces
i decide again
that in theses centuries
they have done very well
considering the nature of their
brothers:
it’s more than good
that some of them,
(closer really to the field-mouse than
falcon)
have been bold enough to try.

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Batman action figure. Yes I did take it out of the box.

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Michael Chabon gets serious about genre at the LA Times.

Where did this bias against work created for a popular audience come from?

In all fairness, it came from the fact that the vast preponderance of art created for a mass audience is crap. It’s impossible to ignore that. But the vast preponderance of work written as literary art is high-toned crap. The proportion may settle down in the neighborhood of 90/10 — Sturgeon’s Law said that 90% of everything is crud.

Via Bookninja

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The benefit of toxic car pollution, I guess: no paint required.

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Awesome post over on Adrian Tchaikovsky’s blog about reading in the genre.

A genuine ignorance of the genre is possible. If you simply don’t read it, fine. However if you claim that, and then write this, people may ask how come, since you reinvented the wheel, all those spokes, the hub and the rim were just sitting about ready-made in your store-room. There are books that cross into the fantasy genre from outside, because genre boundaries are artificial and (yada yada yada see previous posts tagged fiction) (6). On the other hand, most fantasy books have strong and clear antecedents within the genre. You wouldn’t write a haiku without knowing how many beats to the bar, after all (7). As a good example of this, David Gemmell wasn’t a fantasy reader. However, he was a Westerns reader, another marginalised genre, and one can see the Westerns influence in his work.

He’s very eloquent about the whole thing, too.

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This month’s National Geographic displayed a picture of a huge ziggurat in the city of Dur Untash, built in the 13th Century B.C., a a vast stepped-temple tower that rose above the landscape, dominating the foreground and horizon. I wonder what the builders of that structure would think if they knew it was there, still standing.

There’s something poignant and humbling about such ancient monuments still, isn’t there, because how many things built today are constructed with as much bloody-mindedness when faced with the concept of time. They’re weathered, a little crumbled, but with a bold dignity that makes anything new seem untested, inferior even.

For me there’s a metaphor, about a monument such as this, that when some people have sparred with age everyone respects them with awe. They speak their name in whispers. Do people become monuments, great legendary figures, I wonder, or do some of us become like artifacts, collectable items that we don’t quite understand, but we want them around us anyway to remind us of something we’re not sure about. A misguided comfort. But most are left to gather dust, the sheer volume of items and constructs given to history, anonymous.

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Gabe Chouinard lights a fire under the ass of reviewers.

I like to start the week off with a bang, so each Monday I will be posting a longer, more indepth piece that will examine varied issues and concerns. The intent is to kick-start a discussion around these concerns; to create an open dialogue with others. I hope you enjoy this meandering piece, and I hope it spurs some thought.

I’m not going to name names.

But according to the review blogs, it seems the publishers have been doing a good job of putting out nothing but readable, good books. In fact, reading the review blogs for any period of time, one might get the impression that SFF is filled with an inordinate amount of quality work, all of which equally demands the reader’s dollars. In fact, reading the review blogs for any amount of time, one may come away with the idea SFF absolutely teems with worthy books.

Which just isn’t the case.

There are a couple factors leading to this overall impression which I’d like to discuss.

And discuss he does. I’ve seen a couple of such musings in the blogosphere recently, and whether I agree or not (I do, in fact, for the most part), it’s certainly important to have these sorts of things out there. Wherever there is. Even with a publishing, or a reader hat on, I’ve seen some terrible reviews of books—not slagging off the books, simply badly written reviews, with little thought, or bringing an agenda to the table before hand. (This is fine, if we assume that the writer doesn’t claim to be any better than a fan reviewer.)

Plus there’s something that brings a smile to my author’s face to hear of reviewers being reviewed.

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