Thursday News: Penguin’s new 13-year old author, NYT lament on YA, NoiseTrade’s free books, and Zane’s money woes
Penguin Signs 13-Year-Old Author – Jake Marcionette is writing a series featuring sixth grader Jake Ali Mathews, who moves with his family from Florida to Maryland and has to settle into his new school and his new life. The first book in the series is set to publish this month, the next in 2015, and the publisher has an option for a third book after that.
Sedita said that he was “blown away” when he found out that the series, which will also feature illustrations, was written by a 12-year-old. The story, Sedita added, “reminded me of what it felt like to worry about finding the right classrooms, take impossible pop quizzes, and figure out the rules of popularity… and made me laugh the whole way through.” –Publishers Weekly
Our Young-Adult Dystopia – Michelle Dean has written a long lament on what she sees as the dark side of YA fiction, both in terms of publishings hunt for new authors (especially young authors) and the “wolves” — readers and reviewers who have the fate of a book’s success or failure in their hands. Apparently, Veronica Roth was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder based on ” the amount of nasty Internet commentary her writing had generated” (of which the article’s author must admit she is herself participating). Compare this piece to the news of Penguin’s newest young author.
The way we yearn for the high end of this work makes the crassness of the current production model all the more infuriating. Young-adult literature is often, in our era, called the last refuge of “good stories.” We think of the best of these books as having a unique, if occasionally idiosyncratic, purity of form and content. That sort of argument actually predates us considerably. C. S. Lewis once wrote, in an oft-quoted article on his affection for the fairy tale, that he liked the form for “its brevity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections and ‘gas.’ ” Much if not all of this applies more widely to books ostensibly written for the young. Even we adults, like Lewis, appreciate that they avoid the baggage attached to the more self-evidently literary. –New York Times
Free ebooks & audiobooks from authors who would love to meet you. – Cory Doctorow is one of the featured authors in this service, which promises “Ebooks and Audiobooks. Completely Free. Completely Legal.” Will it bring authors and readers together or generate backlash from those afraid of piracy? Check it out and let me know what you think.
{quote3:17)–NoiseTrade
Best-selling author ‘Zane’ faces financial mess worthy of a plot twist in her steamy novels – Between the IRS and the State of Maryland, Zane apparently owes almost $900,000, and the state took the step of trying to publicly “shame” her into paying by “outing” her in the newspaper, along with other delinquent taxpayers. Apparently they have been trying to collect what is now almost $350K — the most of any Maryland taxpayer, according to the state comptroller. An unfortunate story, but there is also a lot of great information and commentary on how Zane built her success, how she found a niche in the market, and how she ended up writing erotic fiction, when she initially had no plans to do so.
The real-life twist on Zane’s success has left some of her readers wondering how Roberts — a well-known businesswoman who is publisher of Strebor Books, an imprint of Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, and creator and producer of two Cinemax television series, “Zane’s Sex Chronicles” and “Zane’s The Jump Off” — could end up in a financial mess worthy of a character in one of her novels. –Washington Post
Re Noisebooks.
This: “What if I don’t own the rights to my eBook or audiobook, can I still upload it?
Yes, but it is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the owner or publisher of your work. Please read our Terms & Conditions and NoiseTrade Books’ Author Agreement for more information.”
Yeah. Sure that’s gonna happen.
And this:
“Someone is impersonating me and has uploaded my eBooks or audiobooks to NoiseTrade Books. What do I do?
Contact us immediately via the ‘Support’ link below or email us at [email protected] to resolve any disputes. Please read our Terms & Conditions for more information.”
Um. Yeah. Major attempt to cover their butts, much?
IMO given time this site will be used big-time by people downloading authors’ free books and chucking them up there in the hope of getting paid something–anything–by readers. I can see a number of authors uploading their own free books, however; I’m sure they’ll be hoping to get their eBooks up there first before someone else uploads them.
I don’t mean to be so negative but I’m so very weary of these kinds of sites that enable people to upload copyrighted content that doesn’t belong to them, and then try to make out they’re not in any way liable and put the onus on the author to resolve the matter. And in my mind, the potential to be even worse than an unashamedly torrent site for pirated content is there because THIS site will provide a handy little vehicle for those intent on monetizing someone else’s content.
Yeah. That’s about it, really. I was kinda hopeful and enthusiastic when I first visited the site. But after reading all the terms, and FAQ, not so much. Crawling back to hide beneath my duvet, now.
RE: Our Young-Adult Dystopia
That article is distorting facts to fit its point. Roth had anxiety problems long before she entered the writing profession and received reviews: http://veronicarothbooks.blogspot.de/2011/04/be-brave-and-revise-or-alternately-my.html
In the WaPo article about Zane, EL James is quoted as saying that Zane’s work is like the Fifty Shades for black people. Which I thought was (among other things) backwards, given Zane’s much longer term presence in publishing…and that’s even before touching on Zane as publisher who writes original fiction rather than fan fiction that was P2P.
Oh, wait, that wasn’t EL James being quoted but a bookclub leader comparing the two. But I still struggle with readers comparison for a variety of reasons.
I am going to try the book by 13 year old. Thanks :).
@jmc:
Even though EL James books have opened the genre to a new audience, it seems like some of that audience is unaware that erotica has been around for a very long time
There are already copies of Call of the Wild and other out-of-copyright books uploaded there asking for a “tip” for downloading them. Also the “tip” requested for several other books is… more than what they retail for.
@Maree Anderson: Dear Maree,
I’m responding in my NoiseTrade communications roll, but I am also a career long employee of publishers big and small and a devoted reader for as long as I can remember. NoiseTrade has been a great platform for musicians and record labels for more than five years now. In that time, there have been twelve instances of someone putting up content that did not belong to them. That is 12 out of over 20,000 albums or .06% of albums on the site. We are not passive, we take those albums down immediately.
@LIndsay
Regarding, CALL OF THE WILD, it is indeed in the public domain and you could probably download it for free from many places. However, there are many publishers who print public domain books in e- and print formats. The one currently on NoiseTrade is from an excellent series called “Recovering the Classics” where jackets were crowd sourced from artists all over the world. This particular jacket is pretty cool, but you should check out the others for CALL OF THE WILD and the series as a whole, here: http://recoveringtheclassics.com It really is a great project.
And my last point regarding tips, before I bore you all to death: the assumption is that few people will tip and the tip amount is suggested. You can leave more or less or nothing, it’s entirely up to you. We hope if you love a book you will support the creators behind it at whatever amount you would like.
Yours truly,
Sarah