Book Marks: African Stories, Blockbustering

"My close friend Mercy, when she heard about my novel, congratulated me: I had found out 'what the white people wanted to read and given it to them.'," wrote author Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani in The New York Times. Or, why white people might not be the best judges of what good African stories are.

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Are publishers blockbustering themselves into oblivion? Seems that way:

What they are looking for are bestsellers, which tend to be particularly narrow kinds of books. Most of the gargantuan advances that have made headlines in the U.S. recently are for science-fiction and fantasy books. Every publisher is looking for exactly the same book – basically, they are looking for The Hunger Games again and again. When they say "quality," they mean "mass appeal."

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How the Strand bookstore keeps going in the age of Amazon.

...the Strand is, when you get down to it, a real-estate business, fronted by a bookstore subsidized by its own below-market lease and the office tenants upstairs. The ground floor of 828 Broadway is worth more as a Trader Joe’s than it is selling Tom Wolfe. When a business continues to exist mostly because its owners like it, the next generation has to like it just as much. Otherwise they’ll cash out.

Yup, simple as that.


Also:

• Stephen Hawking's new speech system is free and open-source. Would be great if this means more people in Hawking's shoes will be able to communicate.
• Amazon UK stalls distribution of controversial book Money Logging. Another case for the continued existence of brick-and-mortar stores, at least one of which is retailing the book - for now.
• President Obama shopped at Politics & Prose, Washington - and everybody wants to know what he bought. And authors as "celebrity clerks" in bookstores? Great idea.
• RIP British crime writer PD James and American writer Kent Haruf. The Guardian compile a list of quotes from the former, who would have been Publisher's Weekly's Publishing Person of the Year 2012 - were it not for EL James, brr.
• Who by now hasn't heard of the Eslite store in central Taipei, that 24-hour bookshop drawing in night owls? And why isn't this a thing in Kay Elle?
• Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. JK Rowling) makes the Impac Dublin longlist, as do Malaysians Samuill Tiew and Khaliza Khalid.
• Same-sex attraction in literature? Goodreads data suggests readers prefer authors of their own gender.
• Hitler and Goebbels were fans of Turkish secularist leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, an author suggests in his new book.
• Wanna escape your deadbeat publisher? Writer Beware says don't do these things.
• Amazon's Jeff Bezos says lower book prices mean more money for authors. Here's why he's only half right about that.