Wednesday News: Smashwords’ year in review, NPR’s best books, role of clichés, and parenting parody
Mark Coker Reviews ‘Exciting’ 2014 at Smashwords – So according to Mark Coker, 2014 was a pretty good year for Smashwords authors, despite the overall slowing of the digital book market and the alleged drop in sales some Amazon authors claimed due to Kindle Unlimited. The site itself gained about 20K authors and 22% more titles. Do readers still buy heavily from Smashwords? I can’t remember the last time I purchased a title from them.
In addition, Coker noted that in 2014 Smashwords added new distribution channels, among them OverDrive, Txtr, Oyster, and Scribd; the vendor offers faster distribution to its retail channels (including multiple daily shipments and “near-real time” or same-day uploads to iBooks); and added support for ePub 3, which includes new language support and layout options. Coker also cited faster sales reporting, including a “daily sales tool which provides next-day and same-day sales reporting from iBooks, B&N, OverDrive and Kobo.” –Publishers Weekly
NPR’s Book Concierge Our Guide To 2014’s Great Reads – Looking for something good to read? NPR has their best books of 2014 in a searchable form, with 250 titles arranged by genre and interest. –NPR
Why Do We Hate Cliché? – A great meditation by Rivka Galchen and Leslie Jamison on clichés, which encompasses the way in which they tend to disconnect words from their origins and yet also speak to the common elements of human existence. Galchen’s observations about how we often use words whose origins are so very different from their current use demonstrates the simultaneously relevant and archaic aspects of language, while Jamison’s focus on cliché as simultaneously simplifying and unifying is particularly relevant for genre fiction, which often works tropes to the point of cliché, which can make them both easy to read and difficult to accept as thoughtful or relevant.
Resisting the violence of oversimplification doesn’t resist cliché so much as it resists a certain relationship to cliché: clichés as substitutes for exploration, or clichés as final verdicts, ways of herding the free-roaming beasts of experience into a cattle pen. It comes back to whether you think of clichés as portals or conclusions. Clichés work against us when they replace our tongues entirely, when the greeting card messages supplant our own. They work best when they link our singular experiences rather than efface them — when they function as dangling strings around which the rock candy of individual experience crystallizes. –New York Times
I’d Love To Help My Wife Do The Dishes, But I’m Trapped Under Something Heavy – This is a pretty funny parody of this post by a male faculty member at Boston University who apparently thinks that paternity leave is an opportunity to write his own novel and observe his wife care independently for his child. From the original post:
My son was born in March, and my sabbatical went from early May to mid-January, which, in a tidy coincidence, is nearly nine months. But since his care was taken care of by his mother—whose apparent willingness and capacity to do almost everything for him flooded me with awe—I spent those nine months trying not to be bored while not writing a novel that was coming due. (No novelist who recognizes the unholy hardship of writing a novel ever wants to write a novel.) Hey, the proper dose of lager seemed to slacken my body without sapping my mind, and all day long, while I was not-writing my novel and not-feeding my newborn son, I looked forward to those drinks with a religious panting. — The Toast/Lawyers, Guns & Money
I buy from Smashwords all the time.
Funny parody- good for my morning laugh. And the book list from NPR has some hidden romance surprises!
Smashwords is mostly important as a distributor, not a retailer.
The fact that he describes his paternity leave as “my sabbatical” in the next breath is a tip-off that he never really meant to use it for its intended purpose. Of course, universities are notorious for expecting women to treat mat leave as a sabbatical and produce a book as well as a baby. Some don’t stop the tenure clock while someone is on maternity leave.
@Liz Mc2: I agree, it seems to have been a very bad attempt at satire. It appeared in the December issue of The Baffler, which is entitled “Sickness and Pelf” and whose theme is “the perspectives of those stuck in the waiting-forever room of medical culture, dogged by symptoms unassimilable to diagnostic manuals or public policy prescriptions, and baffled by the offerings of both the medical establishment and alt-medicinal quackery,” according to its Amazon description.
Giraldi has written some dreadful stuff, so this is all of a piece, but it has nothing to do with actual maternity/paternity leave at universities, it’s just his unfunny, revolting take on it.
@Liz Mc2: Re. the sabbatical reference, Gerald notes somewhat acerbically earlier on that BU doesn’t even call what he gets paternity leave, but a “workload reduction,” in a shot at uni administrators that becomes ironized pretty quickly.
@Sunita: I read Giraldi’s piece (the whole of which I found here: (http://www.thebaffler.com/odds-and-ends/brats) as an attempt to demonstrate self-awareness about his selfishness but in a way that just showed a selfish lack of self-awareness, instead. I don’t know if that’s correct, but that’s how it came across to me.
Yes, the NPR Best Books List is searchable by genre– but though there are a few romances on it, “Romance” is not one of the searchable genres.
@Janine: I actually didn’t mind the use of “love stories” as a category, because I thought it might bring in some readers who automatically steer clear of the “R” word. But you’re right that genre Romance doesn’t have a dedicated category.
The comments at the Toast include excerpts from Giraldi’s other writings on parenting, which plumb even greater depths of sexism, racism, religious bigotry, and general lack of self-awareness.
I tried a sample of his published novel, but was quickly bogged down in a morass of sing-song alliteration and tortured metaphor. He writes like someone with a tab continually open to an online thesaurus, but with no clue as to the connotations and associations of his word choices.
Also, like a douche-hat.
@hapax: I wonder if he’s trying to be like Steve Almond, whose writing I really enjoy, and who has made somewhat of a career blogging and writing about fatherhood.
I buy from Smashwords regularly. I appreciate that books are available, and downloadable, in a variety of formats.
@Ros: “Smashwords is mostly important as a distributor, not a retailer.”
Yes, although it used to be a much bigger retailer than it is now. I used to have direct sales at SW almost equivalent to my Amazon sales, but now the SW sales are a trickle.
One of the problems is that SW is promoted to authors not readers, so it’s seen as primarily for self-pubbed authors. And the other is its shitty interface, for which we have long been promised a redesign.
But from Mark Coker’s POV, he probably doesn’t care if he sells direct from the website or through third parties. It’s all good. Authors make somewhat less through third parties though.
@Ann Somerville: I was told at one point that SW offered a bigger cut to authors, is that true?
I do try to buy from them if I have a direct link, but searching the site is an exercise in frustration.
@hapax: Yes they do. From the publishing FAQ:
“We work on commission. We don’t charge for our ebook publishing, conversion and distribution services, and we don’t sell publishing packages. We earn our commission only if we sell your book, and our commission is only 15% or less of the net, which works out to 10% of the retail price when your book sells at our retailers. For example, a $10.00 ebook sold at one of our retail partners earns you $6.00 and earns Smashwords $1.00. The same book sold at Smashwords earns you about $8.00.”
@Ann Somerville: Thanks. I’ll keep using them when I can, then.
PS *love* your gravatar. Was it designed for you?
“Her hands are made of dish scrubbers and teddy bears.” Thank you for sharing the link to the parody. This hit home with me, thanks for the laugh! Long time reader, first time commenter.
@hapax:
Yes it was, by my friend Kiri Moth. I commissioned it from her, and considering how popular her art is now, I got it cheap :)