Monday News: John Lewis, women writing men, piracy, and Noir Reads
Publishing Newsbook subscription service / copyright / John Lewis / Noir Reads / piracy / writing gender16 Comments
Rep. John Lewis’s books sell out following Donald Trump’s attacks – In the war of words between John Lewis and Donald Trump, Lewis has scored at least five bestsellers, as all of his books hit the top 20 on Amazon this weekend, including the National Book Award-winning March. Which is particularly fitting given that today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Amazon listed both books as “temporarily out of stock” on Sunday. Sales for both had ballooned more than 100,000 percent, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Disclosure: Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, is also the owner of the The Washington Post.)
In all, five of Lewis’s books were among the top 20 best sellers on Amazon, including several versions of the “March” trilogy. The hardcover edition of Lewis’s “Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change” was also sold out, though an electronic version was available. – Washington Post
IF WOMEN WROTE MEN THE WAY MEN WRITE WOMEN – I thought I posted this already, but apparently I did not. We talk a lot about men writing women and women writing women, but something about this simple exercise brings into focus a lot of the ways women are essentialized through imagery and descriptive language in very specific ways. For example:
Brett pulled his tank top up over his head and stared at himself in the full-length mirror. He pushed down his jeans, then his boxers, and imagined the moment when Jennifer saw him nude for the first time. His feet were average-sized, and there was hair on his toes that he should probably take care of before tonight. He liked his legs just fine, but his thighs were wide and embarrassingly muscular. He tried standing at an angle, a twist at his waist. Some improvement. In that position, it was easier to see his ass and notice that it was not as pert as it had been at 22. He clenched both cheeks, hoping that tightened its look. He sucked in his tummy and pulled his pecs up high, trying to present them like pastries in a bakery window. Would she like him? Were the goods good enough? He pouted his lips and ran his hands over his thighs, masking their expanse. Maybe. – McSweeney’s
New Study Essentially Suggests That Publishers Should Do CwF + RtB Instead Of Going Legal To Combat Piracy – I haven’t had a chance yet to read the study, but excerpts in this Techdirt piece will not be surprising to those who believe that “fighting” piracy is generally counterproductive. Instead, creators should be engaging fans and consumers such that the “moral equation” around downloading digital content is shifted in favor of the copyright holder.
The International Journal of Business Environment recently released just such a study suggesting that content providers are far better off reaching out and connecting with fans, including those pirating their works, rather than trying to fight piracy legally.
. . . there is something natural in deciding that something that can be reproduced infinitely in a digital manner at no cost differs from a physical good that cannot. It’s the reason why piracy and theft simply aren’t the same thing. This doesn’t make copyright infringement or piracy morally acceptable, of course, but it explains why the moral equation for those doing the piracy is inherently different. Everyone knows this intrinsically, even if some major content industry players want to pretend otherwise. – Techdirt
New Book Service Delivers Stories From The Black Diaspora To Your Door – Created just last week by Derick Brewer and Zellie Imani, Noir Reads, which will deliver its first box in early February. Both fiction and non-fiction books will be included in each box (2-3 for each shipment), and they will be curated to represent experiences across the African Diaspora:
“Our aim was to create a resource comprised of narratives on the black experience and the multiplicity of Blackness,” Imani told The Huffington Post.
With nearly 100 subscribers already, the company has sold nearly half of the 200 boxes they’ve prepared for its launch. Subscriptions are offered at $35 per month or $100 for three months. . . .
To ensure their subscribers will enjoy the selections, Imani and Brewer choose books focusing on specific themes and survey readers to see what they’d prefer. The books that aren’t chosen are then placed under the “recommended reading” section of their reading guide. – Huffington Post and Ebony
Woot ?!
I’ve always disliked the unspoken requirement in romance novels to provide rapturous physical descriptions of characters, a tl;dr shorthand, as it were, for telling us someone is worthy of our affection and attention. IRL, we aren’t attracted to others in such technicolor and minute detail; it’s the small things, not ALL the things.
The McSweeney’s article has cemented my dislike by demonstrating how such descriptions completely infantilize women–by applying the same technique to men–no matter who writes the words. I’m kind of disgusted right now.
Apologies if this is common knowledge, but what is CwF and RtB?
I read the blurb about women writing me and thought of my Dad. Since he retired, my dad reads about four books a week normally sci-if, mysteries, thrillers and some (romantic) suspense he gets from the library. He always mentions he can tell the women vs men writers because women writers tend to be more descriptive/graphic when writing the sex scenes or murder scenes. At 78, he is a fan of Nora Roberts/JD Robb, Janet evanovich, Catherine Coulter and many others. Just had to share.
@Elaine: It’s not common knowledge as far as I know, but apparently it’s used regularly at Techdirt (it’s in the tags). I only figured it out after reading the comment thread. They are acronyms for “Connect with Fans” and “Reason to Buy.”
I couldn’t get access to the full article because none of my libraries subscribe to that journal (I suppose I could ILL it but that’s more work than I feel like doing), so I don’t know what the data and methods are. But if I were to guess, I’d say that the authors are recommending that content providers (by which they seem to mean companies) should bring pirating readers into the companies’ social media environments and build relationships with them, in order to use moral suasion to get them to stop pirating.
If I’m right, it makes me wonder if the authors have looked at the current author-reader relationships at all, since authors do this already and there’s no evidence that pirating is decreased. The structural conditions that encourage piracy (region-based rights and availability, high prices in developing countries, the need for payment methods some people don’t have access to, etc.) are just too strong. (Obviously, I’m talking here about individuals who pirate to get access to a book they can’t have otherwise, not people who pirate for profit or other reasons.)
I know I’ve read a blog post that rewrote passages from several classic sf books switching the genders of the characters – highlighting how badly women were written in a lot of those books. I thought it was Jim C Hines but I can’t find it on his site – maybe it was John Scalzi.
@Darlynne: I agree with you about the rapturous physical descriptions. They not infrequently jolt me out of a story with annoyance.
One of my biggest pet peeves about romance writing techniques is a bizarre tendency to over-sexualise the heroine’s (usually) body during sex scenes from her own pov. If the hero is thinking about her “lush breasts” or “satin skin,” I might roll my eyes, but whatever, he’s experiencing her body as he experiences it (although do men really think “lush”?). But when I’m in the heroine’s pov, and I get “lush breasts” and “satin skin”? That’s just ridiculous. Why would anyone be thinking “Wow, my breasts are so LUSH!!!” when they’re doing the nasty? It sounds very self-absorbed.
@cleo It was definitely Jim C. Hines, I read that article too. But they were written months ago (six months?), which is probably why you couldn’t find it. Interestingly enough, he included his own books too :)
@Sunita Thank you! I really couldn’t figure it out. I like the idea of moral persuasion being used to decrease piracy, but I think that’s probably more wishful thinking than anything. Book prices are the number one reason I decide not to buy a book, but fortunately the really high priced ones seem to be best-selling authors that the library gets in as soon as they’re released, so there are ways to read the books that don’t involve piracy. That said, I live in a first world country, so I’m lucky to have that option.
@Kay: Found them!
http://www.jimchines.com/2016/06/if-we-wrote-men-like-we-write-women/
http://www.jimchines.com/2016/06/if-we-wrote-men-like-we-write-women-part-ii/
This example below is why some pirate books.
Authors want to do something, fix international rights to be fair.
“The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison $ 1.99” a daily deal.
The price for me just because I live in Australia, is $34- $38.
It’s a eBook. And no eBook is worth that, unless it does your laundry, vacuums and cooks a meal for you every day.
And this happens to every single book in the daily deals, except for the occasional self/ small publisher book.
@cleo: Thanks for posting those links. The gender-swapped excerpts there were super-discomfiting, even more than the McSweeney’s examples. I had actually read some of those authors (and in the case of the Asimov, the actual book) in my youth, ugh. It was interesting to see some of the commetors on Jim Hines’ blog grapple wth similar experiences, too.
I wrote a children’s novel from the point of view of a 13 year old boy. A male writer friend of mine reviewed it to check the “boy voice.” His one comment was that I used too much description when the boy admired a woman. He said the character wouldn’t be cataloging her dark, curly and what she was wearing — it would be more like a punch to the gut, a visceral reaction. Curiously, after reading the book, my husband was absolutely convinced that I had described the character as a redhead. He had to go back through the book before he admitted that I had never described her hair color at all.
Another reason not to over-describe characters — I read one generally enjoyable book where the author mentioned multiple times that the male romantic lead looked like a young Burt Reynolds. I could only picture the older Burt Reynolds, who I do not find attractive, and it interfered with my ability to see the character as sexy. Better to leave appearances as much as possible to the reader’s imagination.
I frequently have issues with men written from the female perspective in romance. They often seem to behave as women wish men would act, overly-romantic, very consumed with detail and very descriptive about things like house detail. I’m not saying that no men notice what colour your walls are or obsess about presents to buy and whether they smell nice, but some of these heroes are more like ‘chicks with dicks’, with their worry about ‘does she really like me?’ ‘Am I sexy/buff enough for her?’
But then I’m very hot on realism, so things like this take me out of a story. It’s not the same for everyone.
@Janine: Yeah. I read Stranger in a Strange Land and misc Asimov as a teen. I have very few memories of SiaSL, but it certainly didn’t trip my “this is sexist bullshit!” wire the way Friday did (the 2nd and last Heinlein I read) – but I was older when I read that, in college not in high school.
@Kris Bock: The hair color thing happens to me too. It’s like my mind wants to picture the character right away and sometimes it extrapolates an appearance based on nothing more than the character’s name. For example if I associate the name Cheryl with the model Cheryl Tiegs, then I might assume a character named Cheryl, even with a different surname, has blond hair. Then, when the writer says her hair is actually dark, I’ll be jarred. It’s ridiculous but I can’t seem to make my mind not jump to these sillly conclusions sometimes.
Re. your story of the Burt Reynolds comparison, I think it’s always a bad idea to compare characters to actors. Not only can it be jarring, as in your story, but those cultural references can date a book. And what if the actor the author chooses becomes notorious for something bad, like for example infidelity or serial marriages, after the book is published? A bad idea all around, IMO.
@Jane Lovering: I agree that some authors write heroes that come across as (unintentioally) feminine in their personality / thinking. But I think that’s part of the fantasy for some readers, a hero who understands how the heroine thinks. OTOH I also think some heroes come across as hypermasculine in a way that doesn’t feel natural either. I mostly want characters to be believable and complex.
@cleo: I read Friday in junior high, and I remember liking it because it had a female agent. I think now it would make me see red, but at the time, I was too young to see the blatant sexism for what it was. Strangely though, I never read another Heinlein. Even as a kid I preferred female authors like LeGuin, McCaffrey and Cherryh.