Tuesday News: Literary Skeumorphism; Zombies; and Kobo’s data partnership with Google
Publishing NewsAuthor Promotion / Kobo / zombies1 Comments
Are We Subjected To Literary Skeuomorphism? – This is a hard to read (black background, white text) short blog entry about the idea of literary skeuomorphism or how authors use something familiar to introduce readers to something unknown. This is actually something that Meljean Brook admitted doing in her first Iron Seas book, The Iron Duke. In the story, a classic romance novel tale of the overbearing alpha male and the less powerful female is wrapped up in iron men, nano agents, and airships. Isn’t that the whole idea behind space operas too. Christopher Fowler’s Blog
The idea was to deliver a familiar romance trope in an unfamiliar setting.
“Now they involve real-life characters who act as detectives (Josephine Tey, Oscar Wilde) or have alternative timelines (Stephen Baxter, Robert Harris) or books in which characters may not have committed crimes at all and are suffering existential crises (The Thief, Snowdrops). The crutch of something known and familiar is being used to ease us into a new form.“
How Hachette Grew Elin Hilderbrand – This is kind of an interesting article about how Hachette, with the help of Barnes & Noble, grew Hilderbrand from midlist to super frontlist. It appears that two things helped Hilderbrand and Hachette: a careful marketing plan promoted by the biggest retailer in the business and good word of mouth.
Arriving at Hachette in 2007 as a solid midlist author with five St. Martin’s titles behind her, Hilderbrand now has over four million books in print, according to Hachette’s figures. As Little, Brown prepares to publish its seventh Hilderbrand novel, Beautiful Day (June 25), it is returning to the message it’s been driving home since the beginning: a new book is dropping from the summer novelist.
But Hilderbrand is trying to grow outside of her East Coast readership into the South, Midwest and West by engaging in road trip signings. I remember when I was in the Amazon Roundtable, CJ Lyons mentioned that her readership seemed to be around 250,000 to 300,000 and that she wanted to grow it. Growing seems kind of incredible when you are at Lyons and Hilderbrand numbers but then you think of the volume of books that are selling for authors like Sylvia Day and EL James.Publishers Weekly
Touch KT’s Google Analytics integration, and how to disable it. – MobileRead Forums – Read novou gives instructions at MobileRead on how to disable Kobo’s Google Analytics integration. I was vaguely aware of Kobo tracking minute behaviors within its app because I’d seen slide shows based on this data (plus you get badges for certain activity). What I didn’t know is that Kobo sends this data back to Google.
Novou wrote, “I’d known about the KT’s GA integration for a while, but after just now looking into the implementation, I am concerned by the detail of the stats…But aiming to report each time you load the home-screen, or read a book for X minutes nonetheless seems like overkill to me. .. That said, for me at least, they still do cross the line into ‘creepy,’ especially since the callbacks are being sent to Google, where those stats will be be saved and analyzed as a part of Google’s hoard of personal data. (If it were Kobo infrastructure, I’d still be concerned, but much less so. Kobo isn’t a business built on harvesting personal data.)”
And then novou goes on to explain how to get rid of the Google Analytics callback. Mobileread
Russians who raised the dead – Well, this is suitably creepy. A Russian scientist experimented on animals (and humans) in an effort to find a way to reanimate the dead. He kept a dog’s severed head alive for 100 minutes and using a mixture containing several different chlorides, sodium bicarbonate and dextrose, brought a formerly deceased infant’s heart back to life. And other grotesque things. It’s kind of a fascinating, if not macabre, read.
Salon has an excerpt from How to Make a Zombie: The Real Life (and Death) Science of Reanimation and Mind Control by Frank Swain.
I feel like it’s often the other way round with the literary skeuomorphism. Steampunk and space opera and whatever the latest new trends are, are using things that seem new and exciting to tell the same old story, not using things which are familiar to introduce something novel.