The link below is to an article/infographic that looks at how readers discover books/ebooks.
For more visit:
http://ebookfriendly.com/readers-discover-books-infographic/
Monthly Archives: April 2016
Why People Buy Books
The link below is to an article that takes a look at 8 reasons why people buy books.
For more visit:
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2016/8-reasons-why-people-buy-books/
Not My Review: North, by Seamus Heaney (1975)
The link below is to a book review of ‘North,’ by Seamus Heaney.
For more visit:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/11/100-best-nonfiction-books-11–seamus-heaney-north-poetry
“First sentences establish a contract with the reader about what is to come.”
Camilla Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia
In Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947), an epidemic spreads across Oran, a town on Africa’s north coast, as Joseph Grand attempts to write a novel. Grand dreams of writing a book that will cause his publisher to leap up from his desk (the publishers in this world are men), and gasp in wonder.
But he can’t get the first sentence right. He worries at every detail, frets over meaning and rhythm. He arranges and rearranges it. There is no possibility of a second sentence. Without the first line, the novel is obstructed.
Camus had a blackly comic sense of humour. And so he causes Grand to go on scribbling through the night, parsing his phrases as the town around him is laid waste. Grand continues to write even as he succumbs to the disease himself. And after he is miraculously cured (the local doctor having burnt the offending manuscript), Grand returns to his sentence once again. He has, he tells the doctor, got the sentence by heart.
Like Hemingway in search of the “one true sentence” he needed for a story to begin – or Flaubert in his excruciating search for “Le Mot Juste” – Grand is convinced that a novel begins with its opening line, and by following that line the writer – no less than the reader – travels along a path to the novel’s final destination.
Camus is keenly alive to the absurdity of Grand’s conviction – the strange futility of his endeavours – but there is perhaps a subtler irony in the fact that he was equally alive to the formal requirements of a good opening sentence. Of course, he also knew that opening sentences are seldom written first, but somewhere in the muddle of the middle, or more often last, and as an afterthought.
An ‘angle of lean’
First sentences do a special kind of work. They have, as critic Stanley Fish once said, an “angle of lean”. They establish a contract with the reader about what is to come; they may sketch in a character, establish a mood, foreshadow a plot, or set out an argument. They seem to set the direction for every other sentence. The first words are also, in this sense, the last words.
Take, for example, Tolstoy’s famous opening from Anna Karenina (1873-77),
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The sentence not only sets up one of Tolstoy’s key themes – the struggle between happiness and freedom, or, more broadly, between living for oneself and living for others. But it also throws up a series of questions or contradictions that will rule the lives of his characters until the very last page.
It is, of course, far from true that all happy families are alike. The idea is no more plausible than Jane Austen’s equally famous assertion in the opening of Pride and Prejudice (1813) that, “a man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” But the sentence is true for the world of the novel.
Most opening lines are a little less tyrannical, in the sense of being less overarching or all encompassing.
George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939), for example, starts out with the oddly disturbing sentence,
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
Here it is less the idea as such, and more the odd proximity of ideas and false teeth that the reader finds intriguing.
Oddity is also the principle characteristic of that other famous Orwellian first line of his dystopian novel 1984 (1949),
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.
Here, the 13th strike indicates that things in Orwell’s world are deeply and desperately wrong, but nobody questions them – and, indeed, the reader at this stage is prepared to go along with it too.
Albert, CC BY-NC-SA
It is the task of an opening sentence to pull the reader over the threshold into the world of a book. But the way they do this is often unexpected. They can start with an action, or better still, the dramatic foreshadowing of action.
Graham Greene’s “Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him,” which begins Brighton Rock (1938), is difficult to beat.
Or they can start with a minor action that reveals something about a character. “They threw me off the hay truck about noon” tells us much about the dissolute protagonist of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Why, we ask, was he thrown off the hay truck? Was it something that he did?
Modern writers have become very adept at throwing out these kinds of narrative hooks – often in multiples.
Elmore Leonard begins The Big Bounce (1969) like this,
They were watching Ryan beat up the Mexican crew leader on 16mm Commercial Ektachrome.
Who is Ryan, we ask. Why is he beating up the Mexican crew leader? Why are they watching him? Who are they? And how on earth did all this make it onto 16mm Commercial Ektachrome?
These sentences are successful in luring the reader because they are plucked from the midst of events. Margaret Atwood starts her dystopic The Handmaiden’s Tale (1985) in much the same way:
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Why, we ask, are they sleeping in the gymnasium? Why is the gymnasium no longer a gymnasium? And, indeed, who are we?
Not always so showy
Modern writers have become particularly adept at composing first sentences. They are – admittedly – the first line of defence against rejection by a publisher, or indeed, by an increasingly impatient and time poor reader.
But, in the history of the novel form, first sentences weren’t always so showy.
Jane Austen might be known for the words “It was a truth generally acknowledged …” but among the many first sentences that she wrote is the comparatively prosaic “The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex”, which opens Sense and Sensibility (1811).
And, of course, early novels like those of Defoe or Richardson, for example, were so hemmed in by short and long titles, prefaces, prologues and epigraphs that it often becomes difficult to decide – in a purely formal sense – where the novel begins.
One of the opening lines I regularly set my students is the simple ten-word sentence that opens a novel that was sent unsolicited and under a pseudonym to a London publisher late in August, 1847. It reads,
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
The simplicity of the sentence is deceptive. Why do they walk, we ask, and where do they walk? Why was there “no possibility”? In just a few words the reader knows a lot. We know that the characters have a routine; that the routine occurs daily. It is therefore perhaps more than a routine but a custom or indeed an obligation tied to a set of social norms or a way of life.
We know this – innocuously enough – from the use of the relative pronoun “that”, which restricts the meaning or application of the action to “that day”, as opposed to all the other days. But it is perhaps the words “no possibility” that stay with us.
These words tell us that had there been the remotest chance then the characters would certainly have gone. In searching among the possible reasons – the inference of windy weather or wild woodlands – the reader might even presume that there is something a little harsh in it. In which case they would be right. It is the opening sentence of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847).
The end of the beginning
Camus’ The Plague (1947) describes a pestilence that is both literal and allegorical. It is a story about Fascism, which might well be read as parable about hyper-capitalism in our own time. Of all Camus’ novels, none describes humanity’s coexistence with death on such an epic scale. Yet Camus opens The Plague with a sentence that is deliberately plain and detached:
The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194- at Oran.
In an article about first sentences the better example would be Camus’ The Stranger (1942), which begins,
Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.
The Stranger possesses the more alluring opening. But a reader would be hard pressed to tell which is the better book.
Which just goes to show that a first sentence – however dazzling – only gets you so far.
Tell us your favourite first lines in the comments, or tweet them to @ConversationEDU.
Camilla Nelson, Senior Lecturer in Writing, University of Notre Dame Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Why Charlotte Brontë still speaks to us – 200 years after her birth
Vanessa Smith, University of Sydney
What is it that makes generation after generation respond to Charlotte Brontë’s books, and in particular Jane Eyre?
Brontë’s novels are bildungsromane, but they differ markedly from, say, the coming of age novels of Jane Austen.
Evert A. Duyckinck, 1873. Courtesy of the University of Texas.
The education of the Austen heroine is a moral one, of a kind clearly mapped out for the reader. We know, through some very explicit signposting, that in order to move from the family home to marriage with “a single man in possession of a good fortune”, she must learn to temper sensibility with sense, or fight prejudice, or a tendency to meddle or be easily persuaded.
Brontë heroines, on the other hand, struggle with questions that are psychologically complex before they are ethical: how to refuse the temptation of a relationship where we are not truly loved; how to achieve respect without status; how to continue to care for the friend we envy.
The answers to such questions are not foreshadowed, and, scandalously for many of her first readers, they privilege principles of self-knowledge and self-expression over conventional Christian moralism.
Moreover, Brontë doesn’t give the impression that the eventual resolutions her heroines achieve are easily won, necessarily worth the sacrifice, or “universally acknowledged”.
As biographer and scholar Juliet Barker has noted,
All Charlotte’s heroines […] were orphans.
They are not beautiful or rich (typically they must work to support themselves), yet they assert their right to a beautiful and rich interior life.
“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!” Jane Eyre declares to Rochester.
Anyone, these books assure us, however little else they may have, can hold on to the integrity of their feelings. And they can seek to express them, with care and accuracy, in language.
Jane Eyre was Brontë’s first published novel, but not her first work of fiction. She and her equally precocious younger siblings Branwell, Emily and Anne, had been producing “little books” since Charlotte was 11. In The History of the Year, her second oldest surviving manuscript, written in March 1829, she tells:
Papa bought Branwell some soldiers at Leeds. When Papa came home it was night and we were in bed, so next morning Branwell came to our door with a box of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed and I snatched up one and exclaimed, ‘This is the Duke of Wellington! It shall be mine’ When I said this, Emily likewise took one and said it should be hers. When Anne came down she took one also.
The toy soldiers were to initiate what the Brontë children referred to as “our plays”: extended games set in virtual worlds – Glass Town, Angria and Gondal – scripted in miniature books in minute handwriting.
Charles Platiau/Reuters
The siblings went on writing these co-authored tales and poems until well into their twenties. They are notable not only for their early precocity of language but for their emergent, blatant eroticism. Their heroes are Byronic, and their heroines beautiful, wealthy and typically masochistic.
Although the Brontë sisters’ novels show traces of the romantic and gothic elements of these early experiments, “poor obscure, plain and little” Jane Eyre, and the cryptic, damaged and independent Lucy Snowe of Villette (1853) are a far cry from such creations.
Once she began writing novels, Charlotte drew on memory as well as imagination, and the sumptuous settings of Angria gave way to a recognisable world of sharply visualised, everyday images: the “torture of thrusting the swelled, raw and stiff toes into my shoes in the morning” in Jane Eyre; Tartar the mastiff “snuff[ing] fresh flowers” spilled on the floor in Shirley (1849); simple pieces of furniture swimming into vision as Lucy Snowe in Villette recovers from illness.
Modern Library
It’s these realist details, as well as the passionate struggles and feelings they anchor, that ensure that we hold Charlotte Brontë’s novels in mind long after we have closed their covers.
The Brontë sisters published their first poems and novels under pseudonyms – Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. While a collection of their poems, published in 1846, sold only three copies, the mystery of their authorship became an issue after the runaway success of Jane Eyre, which came out in the following year.
Readers and reviewers speculated, not just about the gender of the authors, but also as to whether they were indeed three, or one or two writers.
So began the complex entanglement, which continues to this day, of critical appreciation of the Brontë novels with biographical speculation.
Jane Eyre’s experiences at Lowood reproduce Charlotte’s at Cowan Bridge School. Both Villette and The Professor (1857) draw on her time as first a student and then a teacher in the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels. And Shirley’s Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone are revived portraits of Emily and Anne, both of whom died during the novel’s composition.
The temptation to multiply connections between art and life was given further impetus with the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) two years after Charlotte’s death, a work which attempted to curate Charlotte’s posthumous reputation and shield her from accusations of coarseness and lack of femininity.
Gaskell succeeded, however, in setting in place an enduring myth, of Charlotte Brontë the pious clergyman’s daughter from a sheltered Yorkshire village, whose scandalous depictions of female desire and outspokenness were the product of innocence rather than first hand experience.
It’s the thrill of each new reader, 200 years after her birth, to respond afresh to the startlingly modern psychology of her characters, the direct address of her first person narration and the sensuous immediacy of the 19th century world she so compellingly evokes.
Vanessa Smith, Professor of English, University of Sydney
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Hidden housemates: book-loving silverfish
Graeme Smith, Federation University Australia
Silverfish belong to a group of very primitive insects that were already around before insects developed wings more than 350 million years ago. They changed little over hundreds of millions of years but are now restricted to specific habitats, and some have found a living in our homes.
They are easily recognised by the presence of three tail filaments and the lack of wings. Some species have eyes, others do not; some are covered in dark scales, others in yellowish scales and others lack scales.
There are about 600 species described worldwide but this only scratches the surface. The group as a whole has been very poorly studied.
For example, only 50 native Australian species have been described but probably double this number lie undescribed in museum collections, and most field trips result in the collection of more undescribed than described species.
Where do they live?
Silverfish live mainly in three unusual habitats:
Dry leaf litter, the bark of trees, sheltered under rocks. Silverfish are generally found in the driest material. If there are cockroaches in the leaf litter, it is probably too humid for silverfish. They thrive in hot conditions and are quite common in desert regions.
Most of the family Lepismatidae, including those found in our homes, fall into this category, including one (Thermobia domestica) that prefers the hot dry conditions surrounding ovens in bakeries.
Subterranean. These eyeless species are found in soil or in caves and recently have been found in deep subterranean habitats (deeper than 20 m) during survey work in holes drilled for iron ore exploration. Most of the family Nicoletiidae are in this category.
Graeme Smith
Living with ants or termites. One subfamily of silverfish has moved into the nests of ants and termites where they apparently feed off refuse in the tunnels or perhaps even steal food from their hosts. They avoid being killed by their hosts through their speed and agility and also probably by the use of disguising pheromones.
Graeme Smith
Ancient insects
Apart from a lack of wings, silverfish have two other primitive traits that distinguish them from their winged cousins.
First, they do not have a final defined adult stage but will continue to moult throughout their life. They reach sexual maturity after about the ninth moult but will continue to moult as many as 50 times during their life.
They mate after moulting so they can lay eggs. They can live for several years, moulting every one to three months depending on temperature and their diet. One advantage of such regular moults is that silverfish can regenerate lost appendages at the following moult, be it a leg or an antenna.
Second, silverfish do not have internal fertilisation. Instead the males and females engage in a mating dance. The male produces a group of threads with a bundle of sperm onto which the female, after suitable encouragement, then sits to take up the spermatozoa.
Silverfish in the home
Several species of silverfish have found suitable habitat within our houses, but one of them, the grey silverfish (Ctenolepisma longicaudata), predominates in most countries.
This is quite a large silvery-grey species often found in empty bathtubs, and this fact can be explained by two other peculiarities of the family.
First, silverfish do not need to drink. They can absorb moisture from the air – through their rectum! So they are attracted to the bathroom because there is more humidity in the air.
Second, silverfish have quite simple feet of just three claws. They lack the specialised structures that allow other insects to land on smooth surfaces such as glass, so if they fall into the bathtub they just can’t climb out again.
Silverfish used to be very common household pests in Australia in the first half of the 1900s but are declining with the introduction of different household furnishings and cleaning methods. They are basically omnivorous but in houses they prefer starchy materials supplemented with protein from dead insects, insect hairs, fungal spores and pollen, or whatever else they can find.
In our homes they will eat paper, especially old books and the cardboard covering of plasterboard. Wallpaper sizing was often attacked, but wallpaper has gone out of fashion and new glues and sizing compounds are perhaps not so palatable. Silverfish will eat rayon and cotton but not wool, natural silk or fur pelts, unless these have been stored with foodstuff spilled on them.
In general, silverfish are not that important as pests in Australian homes, unless you are a collector of rare books or old photographs. They are slow breeders, and a good spring clean, including seldom disturbed cupboards, will go a long way towards keeping their numbers under control.
If all else fails they are fairly susceptible to most household insecticides and can even be caught in sticky traps baited with rolled oats.
This article is part of a series profiling our “hidden housemates”. Are you a researcher with an idea for a “hidden housemates” story? Get in touch.
Graeme Smith, Phd candidate, Federation University Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
‘Supp’d full with horrors’: 400 years of Shakespearean supernaturalism
Colin Yeo, University of Western Australia
The expression “star-crossed lovers,” one of the earliest recorded “knock, knock” jokes and many other one-liners, metaphors and entirely new words, are some of the gems we associate with Shakespeare.
What is seldom acknowledged, out of Shakespeare’s abundant contributions to our culture, is his influence on the genre of supernatural fear.
Nearly four centuries after his death, the Bard’s impact on supernaturalism and the Gothic genre is equally as significant as his other writings on power, English history, death and love.
Shakespearean ghosts and witches have found a compelling afterlife in a post-Gothic world of film. Macbeth’s weird sisters have been depicted as schoolgirls, nuns, and garbage men. Sometimes the ghost of Hamlet Senior is downright terrifying. Sometimes Hamlet hugs his father’s ghost. Even in Disney’s G-rated Hamlet, elements of the supernatural – in the form of Mufasa’s ghost – are still retained.
When we measure the Bard’s contribution to literary culture, it’s arguably most pronounced in his depictions of the nightmarish and the otherworldly which have inspired so many over the years.
Night of the living dead
Macbeth, a play shrouded in superstition, is one of the few Shakespearean plays that earned the moniker “The Scottish Play” to avoid having to use its supposedly-jinxed title. Given the newly-crowned King James’s interest in witchcraft in the early 1600s, (James authored the treatise Daemonologie in 1597), Macbeth echoes a cultural fascination with superstition and the occult.
Hamlet begins with a “night of the living dead”: the nocturnal visit of Hamlet Senior provides the narrative thrust which leads Hamlet on to both his tragic death and one of the most overwrought soliloquies in literary history.
In 1764, at the height of the Enlightenment, Shakespeare’s ghosts and witches were crucial in the genesis of the first English Gothic novel: Horace Walpole’s, The Castle of Otranto (1764).
Like Shakespeare’s haunted Danish castle in Hamlet, a ghostly giant and a skeletal apparition populate Walpole’s Otranto. Eschewing the values of reason extolled by the Enlightenment, Walpole’s text challenged the vogue of the eighteenth century realist novel by deploying the machinations of supernatural fear. Notably, Walpole acknowledged the influence of Shakespearean supernaturalism, citing terror as the “principle engine” of his narrative.
Terror vs horror
At the turn of the eighteenth century, the efforts of Gothic authors Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis would follow in Walpole’s footsteps. Radcliffe and Lewis drew on Shakespeare in different ways, but both cited quotes from Macbeth as epigraphs to chapters in their novels.
It’s arguably at this juncture in literary history that the differences between supernatural “terror” and “horror” become more clearly defined. Placing an emphasis on terror, Ann Radcliffe pioneered the genre of “explained supernatural”, where terrifying, seemingly supernatural events in her novels were given a realistic, rational explanation. Radcliffe mirrored the suspense and fear of modern thriller films.
On the other side of the coin, Matthew Lewis’s scandalous novel The Monk (1796) eschewed realism, infusing the genre with unrestrained, and horrific, descriptions of the supernatural. Lewis presented readers with nightmarish visions of the Devil, a succubus and individuals haunted by ghosts. The Monk’s explicitness both shocked readers and found praise with critics. Lewis was subsequently forced to censor parts of his novel, including a particularly violent closing scene that shows the antagonist’s brutal death at the hands of the Devil himself.
Lewis is also connected to the other great supernatural books of the era: he knew Lord Byron, John Polidori and the Shelleys. In August 1816, Lewis visited Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley in Geneva – had he arrived several months earlier, he would have been privy to the period of inspiration responsible for the creation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819).
From supernatural to sci-fi
The Victorians expanded the Gothic genre beyond supernaturalism: Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (1886) and the novels of H.G Wells showed a shift towards science fiction.
This period also gave us Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Stoker wove elements of Hamlet and Macbeth into one of the most well known and influential Gothic texts of all time.
Moving from the Victorian fin-de siècle to the 20th century, Gothic novelists have paid a consistent intellectual debt to Shakespeare in the genres of terror and horror.
Pioneer of “cosmic horror”, and the creator of the monstrous Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft, cited Shakespeare in his exposition on supernatural horror in literature. Lovecraft’s own ideas on unimaginable horror echoe Shakespeare’s Macduff’s comment on horrors that “neither tongue nor heart can convieve”.
Stephen King’s Jack Torrance from The Shining (1977) is a rampaging Macbeth reincarnated. Even Stephanie Meyer’s star-crossed lovers in Twilight (2005) have shades of Shakespeare’s doomed Romeo and Juliet.
In 2016, we celebrate 400 years of the Bard’s impact on our cultural consciousness. While Shakespeare is most often associated with “high culture” and an English literary canon, one tends to forget that he was very much an entertainer. Shakespeare’s knack for tapping into what makes people afraid is arguably one of his greatest achievements.
Colin Yeo, PHD Candidate, English and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Wood’s decision to keep all her prize money reflects the values of the Stella
Camilla Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia
Charlotte Wood has won the fourth annual Stella Prize for The Natural Way of Things, a dark and dangerous book shot through with a kind of feminist rage that – after decades of anti-feminist backlash – is long overdue.
Allen & Unwin
In breaking with a nascent tradition of Stella award-winners donating their prize money to charity, Wood also raises the question of whether benevolence of this sort might be an unconscious by-product of the kind of guilt-ridden sense of inferiority suffered by many women writers.
Kate Grenville, for example, has often said that despite her many dazzling books – and her earliest works are among her best – she never considered herself to be a “proper writer” until she won the Orange Prize for fiction.
Wood told her audience, to great applause, that in a world in which the incomes of writers have plummeted to an unliveable degree that she would keep the kudos and the cash.
The money, Wood later told the Guardian, was “not just symbolic, and not just a gesture, but serious, practical and powerful.”
Wood’s book occupies a risky, dystopian terrain. Ten young women – all of them linked by media-hyped sex scandals involving powerful men – have been kidnapped and incarcerated on an isolated, broken down rural property, run by a mysterious security corporation.
They are kept in “dog boxes” behind electric fences by prison guards who preside over a brutal regime of re-education involving shaved heads, coarse gowns, semi-starvation and hard labour in the searing heat.
Wood’s novel deals with misogyny and the abuse of power. It is especially powerful in the way it deals with internalised misogyny of the kind that is habitually and unconsciously forged through women’s daily encounters with sexism.
It is particularly urgent in the way it conjures up the ghosts of contemporary sex scandals for which women have been both blamed and shamed – hyper-mediated scandals regularly consumed as cheap entertainment including those in the military, politics, football clubs, and in social media. It draws attention to the fact of violence against women, which it presents as both a cause and effect of sexual inequality.
The novel is unsentimental in its treatment of the female characters, and yet they must gradually assert themselves, and look to each other for survival.
The Stella judges said,
The Natural Way of Things is a novel of – and for – our times, explosive yet written with artful, incisive coolness. It parodies, with steely seriousness, the state of being visible and female in contemporary Western society…
The novel provokes serious and important conversations … [It] is a riveting and necessary act of critique … With an unflinching eye and audacious imagination, Charlotte Wood carries us from a nightmare of helplessness and despair to a fantasy of revenge and reckoning.
The A$50,000 annual Stella award recognises the excellence of women’s contribution to Australian literature.
Works shortlisted for the 2016 prize include Tegan Bennett Daylight’s Six Bedrooms, a collection of short stories about teenage worlds, which is riveting for its intensity and reality; Fiona Wright’s startling series of essays on anorexia, Small Acts of Disappearance; Peggy Frew’s novel Hope Farm which explores the emotional fallout of the communal experiment through the eyes of a child; Elizabeth Harrower’s dark and complicated constellations of human behaviour mapped out in her short story collection, A Few Days in the Country; and Mireille Juchau’s searing novel about grief, loss and the aftermath of a young girl’s death from cancer, The World Without Us.
Wood’s decision to keep all her prize money also reflects the values of the Stella, which is designed not only to celebrate Australian women writers and to provide role models for aspiring female writers, but also in a practical way to bring more readers to women, thereby increase their sales, and through prizes provide,
[The] money that buys a writer some measure of financial independence and thus time, that most undervalued yet necessary commodity for women, to focus on their writing.
In this, Wood and the Stella follow the still provocative words of Virginia Woolf, who was, famously, one day greeted by two pieces of news. The first was that women were finally to get the vote. The second was that her aunt had died, leaving her an annual income.
Of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely more important.
For, wrote Woolf:
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Camilla Nelson, Senior Lecturer in Writing, University of Notre Dame Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Hong Kong: Missing Booksellers
Authors, get thee to social media: explaining the rise and rise of YA books
Marcella Purnama, University of Melbourne and Mark Davis, University of Melbourne
Before JK Rowling, critics and experts predicted that young adult (YA) literature would finally die, as sales continued to decline. In 1997, a mere 3,000 YA books were published. A decade later that number was 30,000.
The success of Harry Potter changed everything. YA is now embraced by teenagers and adults alike – a 2012 Bowker Market Research study in the US found that 55 per cent of people buying YA books are over 18.
We’re currently living in the second golden age of YA literature. But why is there a sudden demand for these coming-of-age books?
Apart from the undeniable quality of the books themselves, a generation of online readers are creating new ways to discuss, dissect and celebrate their favourite stories. And it’s driving sales in a big way.
Take John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012). It reached #1 on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble bestseller lists six months before the book was published. It received thousands of five-star reviews, ranked by readers who hadn’t even held their copies.
The reason? Green told his fans – the Nerdfighters – on Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube, that he would personally sign the first print of the pre-ordered books. He ended up signing 150,000 of them, but a pain in the wrist was a small price to pay.
John Green isn’t the only author embracing social media to engage readers.
Amulet Books, in conjunction with Puffin UK, created the campaign “Uncover the Color” to promote the eighth book of the famous Diary of Wimpy Kid series in 2013. The campaign included interactive mini-games and trivia challenges, and was advertised in other children’s websites such as FunBrain.com and CartoonNetwork.com. It resulted in 1.3 million copies sold worldwide in the first week of the book’s launch.
In 2015, Harlequin Teen created a “digital oracle” on Twitter to promote the first book in Eleanor Herman’s new Greek-inspired series, Legacy of Kings. They invited readers to ask @HarlequinTeen on Twitter using hashtag #asklegacyofkings. The program responds with one of 100 statements from various gods, including Poseidon and Athena.
If content is king, to repeat that somewhat hackneyed and sexist Silicon Valley mantra, social media has undoubtedly become queen.
Should publishing be “more about culture than book sales”, as a recent article published in The Conversation has it? The point is moot. Publishing has always been about both culture and commerce.
Art and commerce has come together in a related trend: the resurgence of the middlebrow reader. Academic Beth Driscoll describes these readers as middle-class and aspirational, seeking emotional connections with book characters, other readers and authors.
In other words, reading has become more than ever an emotional, cultural and social act. YA readers are at the forefront of this: discussing books, connecting with other fans and tweeting to their favourite authors to ask about plot holes.
They create drawings, songs, poems and fan fictions to declare their love towards a certain book character (in late 2000s, the debate of the Twilight decade seemed to be: Are you Team Edward or Team Jacob? They dress in Gryffindor robes and bring their wands to bookshops to queue for J.K. Rowling’s final Potter book.
Hannibal Hanschke.
This level of engagement has not been seen in readers of other genres, and increasingly it has an impact on the success of a book. A 2014 study of over 10,000 Facebook and Twitter posts proved that social media activity helps drive book sales.
Yet it’s not just the quantity of social media mentions that creates success, but their quality.
Recently, Marcella Purnama studied readers’ emotional engagement and its impact on the success of YA author John Green’s books, drawing on the Goodreads reviews of Green’s four books. The results showed that high levels of emotional engagement from readers correlated with better Goodreads ratings.
The more emotion readers show online, the more they interact with others about the books. And the more interaction, the greater the success of the books.
This creates a snowball effect, driven by high levels of social media engagement among YA readers, that has helped drive the growth of the category as a whole.
Sadly, some publishers and authors are still reluctant to use social media to market their books. Often publishers depend on booksellers and authors to connect directly with the readers, while authors hope that the publishers’ expertise and connections will increase book sales.
Readers are eager to share their reading experience. They share their latest reads on Facebook, write reviews on their blogs and actively find fan communities to talk about their favourite characters.
The books that rise to the top will be the books with the most engaged readers. And it’s up to publishers and authors to keep the fire going.
Marcella Purnama, Masters Candidate in Publishing and Communications, University of Melbourne and Mark Davis, Lecturer in Publishing and Communications, University of Melbourne, University of Melbourne
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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