what readers want

People Are Not Reading The e-Books They Buy Anymore

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This post by Michael Kozlowski originally appeared on Good E Reader on 9/20/15.

Are people reading the e-books they purchase from companies such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble or Kobo? There is growing research data that is supporting the notion that people are not reading the digital titles they buy online and for the most part, they are never even opened.

At Book Expo America last April, Kobo dived deep into global reading behavior and analyzed the data.  They found that 60% of e-books that are purchased from their complete line of apps, e-readers, tablets and via the web are never opened. Interestingly, the more expensive the book was, the more likely the reader would at least start it.

There are other companies that are also checking out reading behavior and providing some very interesting data. Jellybooks is a young startup and they have developed e-book tracking software that users opt into getting their reading habits tracked in exchange for free or discounted items. Over 100 publishers are now using their API for their own e-book library, including Harlequin, which uses the code for free romance novels from their new loyalty program.

 

Read the full post on Good E Reader.

 

I Gave A Speech About Race To The Publishing Industry And No One Heard Me

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This post by Mira Jacob originally appeared on Buzzfeed on 9/17/15.

We are ready for a publishing industry that represents the world we live in, and it will ignore us — writers and readers of color — at its peril.

Last night, I walked into a mini-disaster. Or to be more precise, I stood on a chair in it.

A few weeks ago, when Publisher’s Weekly asked me to give the keynote speech in a night honoring the industry’s young publishing stars, I jumped at the chance. Talk about your last year, they told me. Talk about what it was like getting published.

My last year has been intense. My book The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing came out, I spent a few months touring internationally, and from a distance, it looked like one big party. Up close, it looked a bit different. This was something I really wanted to get into, as sometimes when we talk about the sad statistics facing writers of color in publishing, they become just that: statistics. I wanted to back that up by talking about what it actually looks like.

But fate wasn’t with me last night. The sound system at the event was terrible, which was a real problem. But even as I stood up on a chair and yelled to deliver my speech, half the room turned away and started talking over me. By the time I was done, I was talking to a very small ring of people, which felt, well, awful. More awful were the disappointed faces of the minorities in the crowd, the few who hugged me as I walked out and whispered, We wish they had heard it.

Well, I do, too. Anyone got a chair?

True story: A few months ago, a producer from a literary show on Boston Public Radio asked me to read a section of my book on air. I sent it to him and he said he would need to edit it down. I totally got it. Radio is a different medium. Stories need to change. Sure! Change away. Then I got the edits back. Some of them were normal cutting 300 words to 25, but there were others. My characters’ names, he wrote, were confusing. There were three in the scene, could I cut them to two if I was going to stick with the unfamiliar names? And then there was this other note, even stranger. In a sentence setting the scene up, I had written “three East Indian teenagers, kids of immigrants, sit talking on the roof of the house.” In his notes, the producer had crossed out East Indian and written “ASIAN INDIAN.” Asian Indian. As if that is a thing that anyone has ever said to anyone else, excluding the sentence — “Not like American Indian, like Asian Indian.” And the note went on: “Alas!” — not kidding, he really said Alas! like he was some Victorian maiden — “Alas! Americans aren’t familiar with the term East Indian — it’s just not something we say over here.”

This is when my soul kind of made a Chewbacca noise. That horrible howl.

 

Read the full post on Buzzfeed.

 

Revenge of the Reviewed

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This post by Aeryn Rudel originally appeared on Rejectomancy on 7/31/15. Note: strong language.

You’ve passed the first hurdle, getting your work published, and now it’s out there in the wild, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other purveyors of fine literature. You’ve made it. Rejection is a thing of the past, a bad dream from which you have now awoken. Right?

Wrong!

The truth is the ante has been upped, and the stakes have been raised. Your work is now available to the—Gasp!—public. Unlike an editor who maintains some level of civility and professionalism when rejecting you, the book-reading world at large is under no such constraints. They can and will tell you exactly what they think in the most direct and even brutal fashion. An editor who doesn’t like your work will send you a vague form rejection filled with soft, professional niceties. A guy on the internet who doesn’t like your work will say you straight-up suck and the world should avoid your craptacular writing at all costs. And you know what? Good for him. The public deserves their brutality. They’re not getting sent free review copies, they’re plunking down their hard-earned cash, and this affords them the loudest voice of all critics, the voice of the consumer. I think brutal reviews keep writers humble—they’ve certainly humbled the fuck out of me on occasion.

Okay, lets lay down some rules how to handle bad reviews.

 

Read the full post on Rejectomancy.

 

Millennials 'Least Likely to Buy E-books'

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This post by Charlotte Eyre originally appeared on The Bookseller on 6/24/15.

Millennials are less likely to purchase e-books than any other age group, with 63% of 16-24 year-olds saying they have never bought one, according to a report from Deloitte.

For its Media Consumer Report 2015, Deloitte surveyed 2,000 UK consumers about their media habits. It found that 25% of 16-24 year-olds had bought an e-book in the last 24 months, compared to 38% of 25-34 year olds.

Millenials also say they are spending more time using other media, as only 14% of that group read books for more than an hour each day but 67% will watch up to an hour of short form video and 58% will spend more than an hour watching TV.
 

Read the full post on The Bookseller.

 

A Study of Reading Habits in the Age of Aquarius, or, The Novel as Time Machine

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This post by Greg Olear originally appeared on The Weeklings on 3/4/15.

i.

IN MARCH OF 2011, I was on a panel with three other novelists at the Quais du Polar literary festival in Lyon, France. We were there, if memory serves, to talk about strong female protagonists in crime fiction, but the discussion wound up encompassing much more than that. At one point, we were asked about the utility of the novel. In a century of smart phones and dumb tweets, with attention spans shorter than ever, what possible purpose could such an analog medium serve?

I had no ready answer for such an existential question. Fortunately, the French novelist Sylvie Granotier was prepared. It is exactly the analog nature of the form that makes the novel so necessary, she said. In a world of ADHD, she explained—in English as fluent as my French was not—the novel, alone among the art forms, demanded more, not less, attention from its readers. Only the novel could combat the erosion of our collective ability to focus. And it did this by insisting that its readers move at the deliberate pace set by the novelist.

“The power of the novel,” she said, “lies in its ability to stop time.”

 

ii.

In his column in The Believer some years ago, Nick Hornby wrote in praise of the short novel—the work of fiction that, as he put it, if you start reading when the plane taxis along the runway at LAX, you will be just wrapping up as the wheels hit the tarmac at JFK. His novels all meet this criteria. So do mine. Indeed, the lion’s share of fiction churned out by the big publishing houses seems to be written with the sole purpose of amusing the bored business traveler.

 

Read the full post on The Weeklings.

 

The Delivered Story; The Interpreted Story

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This post by David Baboulene originally appeared on his The Science of Story blog on 1/20/15.

Whenever you absorb a story, you are actually experiencing *two* stories. Or at least, two versions of the same story. This is well accepted in academia, and was first documented by the Russian Formalists in the 1920s, (Victor Shlovsky, Vladmir Propp et al) who called the first version the Syuzhet and the second version the Fabula. Great words, but let me try to simplify it to what can help a writer deliver better story today.

The first version is the delivered story. All the tangible sensory stimulation you receive from having the story communicated to your eyes and ears. So, in a film, this includes the music, images, dialogue, action, character behaviours, the poster, the trailer, the reviews you read, the blog-post, your knowledge of the star’s personal life – everything that contributes to what you think about the story.

In a book, of course, the written words are the total sensory stimulation. Here is, allegedly, the shortest novel ever written:

“For Sale. Baby’s Shoes. Never Worn.”

In this case, the total delivered story is just those six words (and whatever else you might overlay if you know it was (allegedly) written by Ernest Hemingway).

 

Read the full post on The Science of Story.

 

So What Do I Do Now?

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This post by Wendy Lawton originally appeared on Books&Such on 2/10/15.

How often do writers encounter a wrinkle of one sort or another and wonder, “So what do I do now?”

When I was writing my very first middle grade book on an obscure figure from history I was shocked to find my character featured in another middle grade book by a well-known children’s writer. I was devastated. I figured my story was already done. My big question was, “So what do I do now?” Happily I stepped back and realized that the story treatment was very different from mine and that my concept offered a series that was a unique presentation. I kept plowing forward and not only finished the book but found a publisher for the series.

We come across many a situation where we ask the question. Let me describe a couple. . .

Wrinkle: Say you are a writer who has been slaving away on a steampunk novel only to read that steampunk is dead in the water.

So what do I do now?

 

Read the full post on Books&Such.

 

This Surprising Reading Level Analysis Will Change the Way You Write

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This article by Shane Snow originally appeared on Contently on 1/28/15.

Ernest Hemingway is regarded as one of the world’s greatest writers. After running some nerdy reading level stats, I now respect him even more.

The other day, a friend and I were talking about becoming better writers by looking at the “reading levels” of our work. Scholars have formulas for automatically estimating reading level using syllables, sentence length, and other proxies for vocabulary and concept complexity. After the chat, just for fun, I ran a chapter from my book through the most common one, the Flesch-Kincaid index:

I learned, to my dismay, that I’ve been writing for 8th graders.

Curiosity piqued, I decided to see how I compared to the first famous writer that popped in my head: Hemingway. So I ran a reading level calculation on The Old Man and the Sea. That’s when I was really surprised:

Apparently, my man Ernest, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose work shaped 20th-century fiction, wrote for elementary-schoolers.

Upon learning this, I did the only thing a self-respecting geek could do at that point: I ran every bestselling writer I had on my Kindle through the machine.

 

Read the full post, which includes many informative graphs, on Contently.

 

Music, Fiction, and the Value of Attention

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This article by Nicholas Games originally appeared on The New Yorker on 1/27/15.

The protagonist of Richard Powers’s 2014 novel, “Orfeo,” is a composer named Peter Els who, late in life, begins to dabble in biotechnology. Els’s attempts to “compose” in DNA turn him into a suspected bioterrorist fleeing across the country; one of his furtive stops is Champaign, Illinois, where he attended graduate school. In a coffee shop that he remembers from his student days, Els recognizes Steve Reich’s 1995 “Proverb” coming from the speakers. In the bravura passage that follows, Powers describes the way that Els listens to the music:

Another modulation, and the ghosts disperse. He wants the piece to be over. Not because of the thrilling sameness: monotony could almost save him now. Because of the waves of connection lighting up long-dark regions in his head. He knows better, but can’t help it: these spinning, condensed ecstasies, this cascade of echoes, these abstract patterns without significance, this seamless breathing leaves him sure, one more time, of some lush design waiting for him.

In the long tradition of novels about music and musicians, this language is new. The listening being depicted is a cognitive event: it happens in the skull and leaps from synapse to synapse, as if it were registering on a brain scan. The imagery of the fMRI machine was, of course, unavailable to Marcel Proust or Thomas Mann, say, who thought of music more in cultural terms than in cognitive terms (though for Proust the subject was, like nearly everything else, intimately connected to memory). But this new language—the lighting up of regions in the head—resonates, because a kind of folk version of neuroscience has entered everyday speech. Nearly all of us now speak of “chemical imbalances,” hormone levels, and how this or that person is “wired.”

 

Read the full article on The New Yorker.

 

Is Reading a Right or a Privilege?

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This post by Cathe Shubert originally appeared on Ploughshares on 1/27/15.

After almost a year of protests by free speech advocates and famous authors, the UK’s Ministry of Justice is going to give prisoners the right to receive books in parcels from family, starting in February. Perhaps the most curious aspect of this case is not that books, among other items that a family member might send via packages as personal property, were banned, but that this case saw lawyers demanding that law be more nuanced with regard to determining whether books are rights or privileges.

Obviously (perhaps more obviously to those of us who have inhaled two seasons of Orange Is The New Black) prisons restrict what is allowed on their premises to prevent the smuggling of drugs and other paraphilia—and it must be noted that the public library system in British prisons was never in danger of being removed. But this case still feels like a victory for free speech and art in one society’s most limited venues.

And it makes me wonder about our prison system in the United States. I did a tiny bit of research and found out that in Florida, inmates often are restricted to having only four books in their possession, and those books must come directly from a publisher or mail distributor—if a family member attempts to send a book via a package service (like UPS) it will be rejected, just as books were restricted in the UK before the amendment to prison policy.

 

Read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

Fired Old Man Angry at World, Ranting About Something or Other

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This post by Ken Wheaton originally appeared on The Word O’ Wheaton on 1/18/15.

Leon Wieseltier, recently run out of The New Republic as a gang of Silicon Valley nitwits took over and tried to fix it, has a piece in The New York Times Sunday Book Review that starts thusly:

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

I’m sure after reading that bit of succinct and too-the-point prose, you’re just dying to read the rest of it. Good luck with that. You see, Leon is what I’d call a writer’s writer — or, as he’s also known, the “last of the New York intellectuals” — someone much more interested in showing off — his skill, his education or his connections — than getting to the point already. There is, of course, a way to do both without looking like you’re trying to hard to do either. But Leon, who IS a smart guy whose writing I’ve enjoyed in the past, isn’t getting it done here. He also seems to be suffering from selective historical amnesia.

 

Read the full post (which is actually about the need for editors) on The Word O’ Wheaton.

 

Science Fiction Romance – Caught Between A Rock And A Hard Place

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her blog on 1/20/15.

Talking about what constitutes ‘romance’ seems to be a bit like climbing over the fence into the lions’ compound knowing they haven’t been fed for a while. But I have to say I find the debate a little bit perplexing when it comes to the genre I mostly write – science fiction romance.

On the one hand, the born-again romance readers insist that without a HEA (happily ever after ending, for those not in the know) or at the very least a HFN (Happy For Now) then the story doesn’t qualify as ‘romance’. On the other hand there’s more than a suggestion from the science fiction fraternity (I use the word deliberately) that all that soppy love stuff doesn’t belong in science fiction.

I’m not really a romance reader and I’d be the first to say that my stories are SF action/adventure with a strong romance arc. Mostly. I think. And we get back to the old question of genre.

Back in the very recent past we didn’t have a science fiction romance genre. You had a choice: science fiction or romance. So you took your chances. Have your book panned by the hard-line SFers who didn’t want any of the smulchy squishy stuff, or have your book panned by the romance die-hards who protested your story wasn’t a romance because it wasn’t the raison d’etre of the plot.

Let’s consider my latest effort, Crisis at Validor, because… just because.

Is it a romance?

 

Read the full post on Greta van der Rol’s blog.

 

Amazon Offers All-You-Can-Eat Books. Authors Turn Up Noses.

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This article by David Streitfeld originally appeared on The New York Times on 12/27/14.

Authors are upset with Amazon. Again.

For much of the last year, mainstream novelists were furious that Amazon was discouraging the sale of some titles in its confrontation with the publisher Hachette over e-books.

Now self-published writers, who owe much of their audience to the retailer’s publishing platform, are unhappy.

One problem is too much competition. But a new complaint is about Kindle Unlimited, a new Amazon subscription service that offers access to 700,000 books — both self-published and traditionally published — for $9.99 a month.

It may bring in readers, but the writers say they earn less. And in interviews and online forums, they have voiced their complaints.

“Six months ago people were quitting their day job, convinced they could make a career out of writing,” said Bob Mayer, an e-book consultant and publisher who has written 50 books. “Now people are having to go back to that job or are scraping to get by. That’s how quickly things have changed.”

 

Read the full article on The New York Times.

 

Finding Your Genre: An Epiphany

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This post by Christa Allan originally appeared on Jamie Chavez’ site on 12/22/14.

If you’re not from New Orleans and you find yourself plopped in the Big Easy one day, it’s likely one of the first questions you’ll hear is “Where did you go to school?”

Here’s a “quirk alert” that will navigate you through this disarmingly simple question. If you answer with the name of a college or city or state, we’ll know you’re definitely someone who lives outside the greater New Orleans area.

When locals ask that question of one another, we respond with the name of our high school. You may have attended Harvard, been selected as a Rhodes Scholar, or graduated from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. To us, those distinctions provide little, if any, information about the real you.

But a high school? Say a name and we’ll know if it’s public, private, religious, the demographics of the neighborhood in which you were raised, where you shopped and ate, your friends … For the most part, our high schools defined us and were reference points for those who didn’t know us well. And there were anomalies, like the kids awarded scholarships to private schools or the ones who transferred to schools whose football teams won championships.

So finishing my first novel and being asked about genre was as disarming as a tourist being asked about school.

 

Read the full post on Jamie Chavez’ site.

 

The Making Of A Boxed Set

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This post originally appeared on SFR Brigade on 11/13/14.

Boxed sets are a popular commodity at the moment. You see them everywhere, collections of stories by a variety of authors, grouped under some unifying label. But there’s a lot of work involved in putting a set like this together. That’s why we thought we’d share our experiences and lessons learned.

Earlier in the year, one of the members of the SFR Brigade asked for volunteers for an SFR boxed set. Eleven of us promptly banded together, and our Nebula Nights collection appeared in e-bookstores in record time. Since its release at the beginning of August, the set reached #1 on Kobo and All Romance, and charted as high as #3 on Amazon in science fiction romance. The book maintained an Amazon ranking above 10,000 for most of those three months. So you could say it did well. At the end of October, our contract with the publisher expired, so we decided to go it alone, since the set is still selling quite strongly. This article is a combination of what we did, and what we learned from our experience with the publisher.

Ready to go?

What’s your goal?
There’s no point in embarking on a project like this if you don’t know what you’re intending to achieve. In creating Nebula Nights, we wanted to showcase our genre, and encourage readers to purchase more of each author’s work. In quantifiable terms, we aimed at reaching one of the major lists, like the NYT or USA Today. It’s good to dream big!

 

Read the full post on SFR Brigade.