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The Passive Voice Blog
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I love the blog and the blog owner (Passive Guy). Every day I check in at least three or four times.
Yeah, it's a great blog. The commenters (even those who aren't ROBUSTers) tend to be unusually intelligent as well.
I'm a FanGirl - and I NEVER call myself that. I've got the RSS feed and I keep it current.
Only once in my life did I try an RSS feed. I don't understand what it is. (My attempt that one time didn't work; all I got was jibberish.)
What you probably got was a raw XML feed. You need a reader to parse that into something intelligible.Google has a reasonably user-friendly version: Google reader.
Much like FB and Twitter, they keep screwing it up with each iteration, but it's still pretty decent.
All my RSS feeds come through my email. Outlook does it easilyy enough to not be annoying. I follow quite a few blogs with Google Reader. They get a glance most of the time. There are just too many.
What I like to do when visiting PG's blog is look at the upcoming titles and try to guess what they'll be about. You can't always tell from his headlines.It seems that PG puts a lot of energy into what he does and I sometimes wonder if he feels discouraged when he posts something long and detailed -- and no one comments. Maybe he knows there are people like me who read everything he posts, but don't always have something to say.
Well, he's spoken of before how his traffic has increased exponentially (a few choice links from some of the popular writer blogger types), so he's well-aware there are a lot of eyeballs on his posts at least.
I get a lot of hits on my own blog because of his.People check out the comments and the commentators.
Another good one - Shaming readers about the type of books they read.Romance has SUCH a bad name.
The ironic thing is an analysis of traditional publishing industry fiction revenue patterns indicates that they, for the most part, survive on genre fiction as well, or, at minimum, have to admit that it is a major chunk of their revenue.Cozy mysteries and romance have been the biggest slices of the overall fiction revenue pie for quite some time. Is Patterson supposed to be upmarket? 220 million books sold. Nora Roberts 450 million. Sherilyn Kenyon (paranormal romance) has sold over 20 million books. And so on and so on.
It was just three years ago that I read some angry diatribe by some midlister literary type who was bemoaning that trad publishers and agents wanted nothing but "badly written books about vampires" (or something to that effect) and her book didn't stand a chance accordingly. She was hardly the only person to complain about that. Heck, it used to be I couldn't go a week without seeing an agent complaining about how they didn't like that XYZ genre trend was still popular.
What eBooks and the concomitant distribution revolution do is simply let authors write what they want and readers find what they want. The traditional publishers and relevant intellectual supporters should do their best to leverage that to their advantage instead of just complaining about people's reading habits.
I'm guessing that "You suck and have terrible taste" just isn't a particularly useful persuasion tactic.
The other ironic thing is that since starting to read a lot of indie books, I've run across several very self-consciously super-literary books that'd have NO chance at modern commercial release and just other stuff, like niche historical fiction in otherwise unpopular periods (e.g., not Rome, the Tudors, et cetera) that are well-written, but just not considered "commercial" enough.Oh well. What do I know? I'm a downmarket genre hack. :)
Looks like I'd better check this one out.
Passive Voice blog is also good as a sort of good aggregator. He tends to comment on some of the more thoughtful blog posts out there in the Publish/Write-o-Sphere related to indie publishing and conventional publishing issues.
It was just three years ago that I read some angry diatribe by some midlister literary type who was bemoaning that trad publishers and agents wanted nothing but "badly written books about vampires" (or something to that effect) and her book didn't stand a chance accordingly.I think that post was from The Militant Writer blog. Mary is a friend. She was really frustrated. I've got a copy of her new book waiting to be reviewed.
I was (I am) less interested in it as an example of public self-immolation than as an intriguing snap-shot of many different publishing ecosystem member attitudes toward what trad publishing means and represented (as many agents, people vested in the traditional paradigm, and even a few editors chimed in).I didn't really agree with her fundamental thesis, but a supporting implicit axiom, that traditional publishing had become a mostly commercial entity with little interest in growing writers or supporting anything but commercial blockbusters, actually, I thought was actually somewhat strengthened by a lot of the agents coming in and saying variations on, "Sorry, you didn't sell well and are having trouble. Deal."
The funny thing now is that I see media sources like the Guardian and many agents/editors couching their defense on the conventional/traditional/legacy/or whatever publishing establishment in terms of things like the "history of literature" and "not pure commercial interest", et cetera.
I actually do feel that most people who go into the publishing business in some capacity genuinely do like books, but I have to raise an eyebrow when the new party line is becoming, "eBooks will destroy our minds and literature by reducing our books to nothing but icky-poo genre books" when within my toddler son's lifetime, they were smacking around people like your friend with, "This is a business. Don't whine because we sell what people want."
The creative destruction is fascinating to me. I mean maybe pre-early 90s or so, a lot of these "we publishers are defenders of the literary heritage" arguments might have had more validity, but it's downright amusing in the post-consolidation age.
The creative destruction is fascinating to me. I mean maybe pre-early 90s or so, a lot of these "we publishers are defenders of the literary heritage" arguments might have had more validity, but it's downright amusing in the post-consolidation age.
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I heard the same argument when mp3 music files became all the rage online instead of going out and buying vinyl or cd and dvd recordings. Everyone I know said that the mp3 revolution would push music back into the scum that floats on the bottom of the dirtiest pond. Granted, it's given people the opportunity to showcase their spectacular lack of talent but it has also allowed people to showcase their style of music that would otherwise have slipped through the music moguls' huge cracks anyway.
Books are a business, if there is no money to be made in a particular genre, then why should publishers go out of their way to print a run just to satisfy some one person's belief? Most if not all companies affiliated to entertainment/hobbies and the like cater to what the masses want. Fringe populations are all about the cult status of an item, not necessarily the popularity of it with the masses.
It seems like this sort of discussion pops up every few decades.Mass printing will destroy civilization!
Penny dreadfuls will destroy civilization!
Dime novels will destroy civilization!
Mass market paperbacks will destroy civilization!
Really, though, I wonder if one of the fundamental beefs many angry people have is that proliferation of titles limits the ability of particular titles to become as immediate major cultural focal points.
We're perhaps leaving the age (or already have) where there's not a true core canon that all the "respectable" people will have read, even in the more fancy-pants literary world. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing I can't say.
Doesn't matter maybe. All those genetically engineered Esperanto-speaking frog cyborgs will ban us from reading in 2025 anyway. ;)
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What about all those penny dreadfal books written when the Wild West was truly wild? If anything they mythologised people like Wild Bill and the like. They certainly never destroyed civilisation as we know it (we're doing that all by ourselves quite nicely thankyouverymuch!).
Whether a book is badly written and edited or well written and well edited doesn't matter much these days. Once again to use the music industry as a great example - if someone like Bieber can make it (and a host of other one hit wonders) then most any indie author has a chance. Even the ones that are truly awful. Just like there is a market for the highly respected authors, so there is a market for the truly awful.
You have to read a lot of penny dreadfuls in order to recognise a well-written book.I love the modern Dollar Dreadful - after a reader has enough of them, they start looking upscale.
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I like Passive Guy and follow him on Twitter. I like a good story and read broadly, and even more so on my Kindle, but I have to agree with his last statment in the piece:
The clear and present danger with the Kindle’s penny-dreadfuls is that over time they put off readers, not because the books are ‘downmarket’, but because they are badly edited and poorly presented.
He has it exactly right to me. I'm one who minds if a book is badly edited and poorly presented; I find it distracting and unenjoyable. The worst problem is one cannot get from Amazon reviews if a book is either, and I'm not about to read a whole sample for each book just to find that out about it. For a few months there I was pleased to find the books I was reading on Kindle had much improved in those areas, but some of the last few have been very highly recommended and very disappointing - and a waste of valuable time.
I believe there is room for penny dreadfuls - or dollar or whatever one wants to call them - my term has always been 'pulp', and I've enjoyed many of them. My beef is with well-written, 'literary' for want of a better word, books which show great promise and are touted as such, and may even have been edited, but then were 'published' without the final step of copyediting and formatting.
I mostly agree with you, Sharon, but there was one exception among the Kindle books I've purchased. There was one written by an author who used the Kindle forum to antagonize posters, baiting others into battles. Her writing was trashed by just about everyone who looked at it. Out of curiosity, I bought the book and read it all the way through. There was a great deal wrong with it. There had been no attempt at editing, which the author readily admitted, and the wayward spelling and grammar was astonishingly bad. But it was one of those rare books that had something truly special: a unique voice. It was also oddly affecting, drawing an emotional response from me I hadn't expected. I reached a point as I read when I thought the author might have stolen from someone famous -- stirring a real wordsmith's work in with her own faulty work. I picked out phrases and ran them through Google, certain that I would "catch" her having stolen something, but I didn't find a single match. The writer had talent and, with the right editor, could earn the respect of those who'd been trashing her. I later learned that a well-respected reviewer had done exactly what I had done, running phrases through Google expecting to find plagiarism. We couldn't believe that this diamond in the rough had such polished moments.When I went searching for the troublesome author's phrases on Google, I was reminded of a beloved short story in which the main character meets a homely woman whose manner he admires despite her overweight body and plain face. The way she held her fan, or gestured, or moved, or dressed captivated him, and he found himself searching for the woman she was copying -- certain that none of what he admired could be of her own making. All along he might have had her, the genuine article, but he couldn't accept finding all that he admired in such an unattractive package so he kept on searching. When he finally realized that she was the true owner of the qualities he sought, it was too late.
The 'diamond in the rough' is the reason to keep reading pulp, or the dreadfuls.
I don't think Amazon removed the buy buttons to make a point to the publishers or flex their muscles. I think they were making a point to the consumer: "We're on your side re pricing." After having made that point, they could then settle into the agency pricing model and start making money on books that used to cost them money. Now book buyers vent at publishers, not at Amazon. Bezos plays chess very well.
Yes, he does.I don't get why everyone demonizes Amazon. They are a technology company, the stuff they sell is just that...stuff.
B&N is smart to spin off the Nook - and if they are REALLY smart they will let the Nook Team run the website and fix it.
Everything I bought this week, other than food, I ordered from Amazon. Everything from paper products and a DVD to exercise equipment. It's the first place I look. But one question that keeps going through my head is this: What'll happen to Amazon if/when Bezos doesn't/can't run the joint? Is it the product of his unique brain, or are there others in line who can keep the business humming along?
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Patricia, I don't know much about Bezos (he's the Amazon owner/innovator?) but I would imagine like any big conglomerate on the internet, there's a whole team of people behind the scenes runnging things in any event. Like there would be with most any successful company.
Kat, I agree with you. Amazon is a business, pure and simple. They cater to their market very well. Anyone could go to any other store and get the same thing. I don't get how Amazon is a demon either.
I just wish Amazon would open an Australian 'store'. It's so annoying to finally find something you've searched the internet for, only to be told 'this item is not available in your country'. Or to order a DVD, totally forgetting that it won't play in Australia because it has the wrong code. And we only get 35% royalty when our own countrymen buy our books. Makes no sense.
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Claudine - there is a TV show entitled 'How William Shatner Changed the World' that gives Star Trek full credit for everything from cell phones to PC's to tablets.
Claudine, Bezos is to Amazon what Steve Jobs was to Apple.
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I need to find that programme Kat.
I'm assuming he's talking about John Sculley, former Apple CEO. He was a key playing in pushing Jobs out of Apple in the eighties. He years later was pushed out for what some might basically sum up as general managerial lameness.
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Ah - but Shatner is merely the cause, not the inventor. You have to admit - there is a bit of truth to it - Star Trek was hugely influencial on Geek culture.
Everything in that encyclopaedia was correct, Andre. What they left out is this: Bezos invented Russia.
Another interesting dicussion on The Passive Voice.