Square Pegs

What with one thing and the other, we were seriously underbooked as we left town for the Thanksgiving holiday — luckily, we were able to borrow from the lending library run by the BS mother (as she doesn’t reread books, borrowing books from her is a kindness). We settled on a fairly recent J.D. Robb novel; it seemed appropriate. But as we settled down to read, things grew uncomfortable. A typo here, a typo there. Then things moved to downright frustrating: the wrong word here, the wrong word there. And out-and-out angering: sloppy scene changes, poor editing. Mistake after mistake, […]

The Internets are buzzing with shock and awe: an author dared to speak out against her publishing house. Now don’t get us wrong — we firmly believe that this type of conversation happens all the time. It is the fact that Anne Stuart’s comments about her relationship with her current publisher, buried in the middle of a long interview, have resonated with so many people that caught our attention. Now let us make it perfectly clear that Anne Stuart does not need our defense (Anne Stuart probably doesn’t even know we exist). She published her first novel in 1974. She

Though it won’t come as a surprise to anyone, our least favored reading material is a celebrity biography/autobiography/ghostwritten claptrap. Very few of these people are fascinating enough to sustain a feature-length article, much less an entire book. Why publishers continue to throw good money after bad books confuses us. Oh right. Money. Power. Fame. Fortune. A lot of quick sales with very little effort. By most accounts, celebrity books lose money. But just enough of them make just enough of a profit that publishers continue to throw unseemly advances in the path of the latest famous person. What publishers don’t

The Village Voice has a fascinating article about the rise of yaoi — fairly graphic male-on-male manga — and how it resonates with straight American women. This isn’t exactly breaking news by any stretch of the imagination; there is a growing group of women who consider themselves part of the romance genre who write yaoi, and given that there’s an adherence to some of romance’s conventions, this makes sense. What makes this article so interesting to us is not that there is an appetite for this type of manga in this nation — it is the clear delineation between fantasy

The recent antics of politicians from both sides of the aisle in regards to using their opponents’ novels (FICTION!) as a way to smear them, or point accusatory fingers at a huge “moral flaw” in them, has prompted me to write this. For those who’ve missed the fun-and-games as we hit the home-stretch to the latest election, check out Fred Head vs. Susan Combs (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061024/ap_on_el_st_lo/candidate_s_romance_novel ), George Allen vs. Jim Webb (http://www.cnsnews.com/news/viewstory.asp?Page=/Politics/archive/200610/POL20061027f.html ), and now the hoopla being made (again) over Lynne Cheney’s book. (http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/10/29/cheney.lynne.novel/index.html ) An Open Letter to Politicians of All Parties: It has recently come to my

One of our official jobs is to watch how the various entertainment industries adapt to changing consumer habits. Though there is a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo behind this work, the key factor is that the world is changing, and the media needs to change, too. Mostly, this involves a lot of jumping on the latest bandwagon without a real strategy. Mobile phones. Second Life. MySpace. Blogs. You name the buzzword, and the publishing industry is dabbling in it alongside television, motion pictures, and music (Penguin UK deserves extra credit for their efforts — one gets the impression that they have

We live in a world of false gratification. We want to know that something is a success before it’s even launched. We want big shipping numbers that bear no relationship to long-term profitability. We live in a world predicated on old-fashioned mores. There was incredible buzz about Bob Woodward’s book, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III…the week before it was released. While the title and its revelations were on everybody’s lips, the books were safely locked away in boxes. Not. For. Sale.

Way back when, possibly just before we were born (but more likely after), Pete Townshend wrote a phrase that roused a generation: “I hope I die before I get old.” As it turns out, Pete did not listen to his younger self, and The Who continue to tour and attempt to recreate old glory. This has lead to our friend Jim making a lot of “Last Who Tape Ever” mixes to celebrate final Who concert tours. Jim has only ever made one Last Jam Tape Ever in honor of a final concert tour. The Jam got out while the getting

While we hope beyond hope that the woefully misnamed “Fred Head”, an apparent candidate for Comptroller of Public Accounts in the State of Texas, is someone’s idea of a hoax, we can take no chances. We do believe that the fine people of Texas understand how books, specifically and generally, work, but since at least one candidate appears confused, we offer some explanation as a public service.

We are just now getting around to taking our summer vacation. There’s an excellent chance that we’ll feel the urge to post from our undisclosed location…if that’s the case, expect nothing from brilliance, if not, well, we’re in a bad mood this week anyway. Nothing worse than a cranky blogger, right? And, yes, we were so busy that we forgot to line up guests to post in our absence.