Author Author

This will be the last Author Author post. As of today, our new site, The Book Studio, has launched. 

It’s all good news, really! Author Author was a blog-with-benefits; The Book Studio is a true destination, including search capability, Twitter feeds, and all-new author interview videos.

I’d like to take a moment to tell you about those videos. Our previous interview setup was produced in a Flash studio, meaning we had just one camera. Our new videos, like this one with bestselling thriller author Linda Fairstein, are taped on a fully staffed set, the same one where Gwen Ifill tapes “Washington Week.” The WETA Studio crew deserves a big shout-out for making our brand-new videos a success — thank you to Charlies, Mary Frances, Glenda, Matt, Dar, Deborah, and many others (please forgive me for not knowing everyone’s names) for all of the work you do.

I’d also like to take a moment before we say good-bye to Author, Author! and thank my team: the WETA.org Office of Digital Media (Pam, Mark, Jess, Elizabeth), WETA supporters (including, but not limited to, Joe, Polly, Dalton, Mary, Mary Kay, Anne, and Michael), and Suzanne, my tireless and committed and supersmart talent booker and associate. You all, as they say, ROCK. I’m privileged to be able to work with you on this new iteration of our project.

All of our Author Author videos will be available here: http://www.thebookstudio.com/video, so you won’t have to say goodbye to our original content — just the old name!

I look forward to welcoming all of our previous readers to The Book Studio. As always, we welcome your comments, suggestions, and feedback of all kinds. Thank you for helping us to keep book content and media alive here at WETA.org!

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Today concludes my fourth full week on Twitter, the social-networking crack du jour. Its round-the-clock quality was partially summed up by one pal’s plaintive tweet last night: “Does anybody here ever go to sleep?” I don’t think anyone answered her; they were too busy trying to catch up on the last one hundred tweets or so.

I could go into various aspects of Twitiquette and what I find most useful about Twitter, but I don’t want to bore you all — I won’t do that unless you ask me. I will continue to bring you LitTwits, however, because this is the fastest, easiest, and most efficient way of finding out which stories are getting my Twitter “flock” of book/publishing folks talking (or tweeting). 

This week’s still-worthy LitTwits:

A new Bat Segundo podcast with Author Catherine M. Valente – @drmabuse

Just when you thought the Kindle 2 was all that, here comes Kindle 3 — @sarahw

Obama’s favorite theologian, Niebuhr, discussed on NPR — @yalepress

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Remember, you can always follow me: @thebookmaven on Twitter.

Here is some of this week’s news that was “tweeted” by my “tweeps” on my new beloved social-networking tool:

Which will win: Strip and Knit With Style, or Baboon Metaphysics? (from @sarahw)

“I try to forbid myself from using the word authenticity because I don’t actually know what the hell it is” (from @idtheory)

Cock-a-doodle-doo! It’s the Tournament of Books! (from @readerville)

Here’s why I love Twitter: Besides getting the above and plenty of other links to book news, I had tweetversations with a couple of author pals, found out what several of my favorite fellow bloggers are reading, and kept up on book events around the country. If I want to add info from more tweeple about cooking, travel, photography, politics, knitting…I can! But I don’t have to…and by self-curating a good Twitter list, I know that I won’t waste my time with tweets about “Going to the supermarket” or “The copier broke, again.” 

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If you haven’t been to Twitter yet, you should at least visit my page and see my cool new Book Maven Media logo. 

If you have been to Twitter, you should follow me @thebookmaven…I promise I’ll at least attempt to be interesting!

But regardless of whether you Tweet like a pro or don’t even know what I’m talking about, the fact is that it’s easier and more fun to pick up professional news on Twitter than it is anywhere else because you control your own sources. Here are a few stories I just learned about:

Britney Spears Memoir in the Works — from The Wrap Books column by Sara Nelson

Is the issue “gender and poetry,” or does anyone read poetry at all? — from The Picador Blog

Nora Robert opens a “literary themed” inn in Maryland — USA Today by Carol Memmott

And those (two of them, BTW, from my pal and colleague Sarah Weinman) are just from the past hour!

I plan to add these LitTwits as a regular feature, and I’m going to find a better way to show them off, too. But in the meantime, happy reading!

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Take heart, Washington Post Book World. While some editors there were still in elementary and high school, the Internets were already on the rise, threatening to take over the world of print. You could have done nothing to stop it.

                                            Please watch this video, if only to see the sincerity on the face of the San Francisco Examiner dude when he says “We’re not in this for money.” Haaaaahaha, Hee, hee, hee. Ahhhhhh… Oh, those days of innocence! 

However, given the demise of print book reviews sections and the quotes about their demise being driven by lack of advertising, maybe we’re all really not in this for money. Hmmm, things are getting interesting. 

(Thanks, Gabe Goldberg!)

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Thank you, Lev Grossman, for that phrase from this article. I’ve been writing about publishing for a long time, now, and I’ve said many of these things before in print, in blogs, and in private. Maybe I’m a coelacanth, too. 

I know we all love paper books. They are warm to us and seem to be a respite from technology. I think it’s worth remembering that when they were first produced en masse, paper books must have seemed just as intimidatingly technological as e-readers and print-on-demand machines do today.

But the worst part about paper books is that they have allowed the publishing industry to cling too long to what Grossman correctly calls an “antique” business model based on unrealistic print runs and returns. 

What would you do if you could instantly change publishing? (I’d make sure author compensation worked well, but I’m a little biased…)

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Via this morning’s Jezebel comes a post based on this New Scientist article. Scientists analyzed the results of a questionnaire about 200 nineteenth-century novels and found that the good-guy/bad-guy dynamic in nearly all of them closely mirrored the values of a hunter-gatherer society, in which heroes emphasize the good of the group and villains are out for themselves alone. The scientists thus concluded that the purpose of novels may be evolutionary.

Evolutionary, but hardly revolutionary: Weren’t there any literary scholars available to talk to these scientists about the role of storytelling throughout human history? Oh, wait: They “believe novels have the same effect as the cautionary tales told in older societies. ‘Just as hunter-gatherers talk of cheating and bullying as a way of staying keyed to the goal that the bad guys must not win, novels key us to the same issues…They have a function that continues to contribute to the quality and structure of group life.’”

Does this mean that those of us who listen to stories and take in their lessons are more likely to evolve and survive? If you ask me, this is an argument for strengthening reading as an activity. I don’t think I want today’s video-game fanatics to be the “group life” that evolves and survives from contemporary storytelling. 

There’s also quite an interesting corollary in here about reading-as-solitary-activity versus storytelling-as-group-activity. The most bookish among us (present company definitely included) tend to read alone, and the authors of these value-reinforcing novels tend to write alone. Could it be that the novels are meant less to help the group — and more to help the individual understand and become part of that group? And what about (as Anna discussed over at Jezebel) the subversive ideas in these novels? What about Heathcliff?

What do you think? 

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NB: Last week it was photo insertion that was giving me fits; today, it’s link insertion. I beg your indulgence as I figure out what WordPress wants from me! Meanwhile, I’m publishing this so there’s something new to read…

When last I wrote, it was to tell you about a new favorite bookstore…it just so happens that I had another fun bookish encounter while I was in NYC. While arriving at the NY1 studios to tape segments on children’s books for the holidays (BTW, our own Reading Rockets has a very cool list here), I literally ran into dynamic mother-daughter author duo Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark, who had just finished an interview. I’d talked with them ages ago when I was AOL Books editrix, but had never met either one of them in person. Why am I telling you this, besides the fact that it was awfully cool to have a drive-by author sighting? Because Mary Higgins Clark told me that they will be here in DC in the spring for book promotion and said she would be happy to consider coming to “Author, Author!” for an interview. That’s not a done deal, but I’m hopeful that with a little planning, our team will be able to bring you interviews with one or both of these extremely popular novelists.

Another snapshot: Yesterday I emailed M.J. Rose to congratulate her on a great review from Patrick Anderson in The Washington Post for her new book The Memorist. She had literally just read the review and said she was “floored.” Since a visitor named Carole yesterday asked if we could interview M.J., the answer is a resounding “Yes!” I’ll be in touch with her publicist this week and will let you know as soon as possible when you’ll be able to read that interview. If you haven’t already read Rose’s previous novel in this series, The Reincarnationist, I highly recommend it — these books are really different, and a great way for historical novel fans to get a dose of romantic fantasy (or is it fantastic romance?).

And now for something completely different…a bit of news that makes me very happy. My colleague John Freeman (until last year president of the National Book Critics Circle, and an extremely talented critic) has been named American editor of Granta magazine. The last time John emailed me, earlier in 2008, he was so exhausted from his tenure as head of the NBCC that he said he was heading into seclusion with a case of Fanta and a complete set of “Knight Rider” DVDs. Either he’s completely recovered, or he’s traded those in for a case of Lilt and a complete set of “AbFab” DVDs. Heck, I’ll raise a can of Lilt in congrats for a job well-won by Freeman. I’m looking forward to some really interesting new Yankee content in my beloved Granta, which is the one litmag I almost always make time to read.

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Laura Miller’s essay in this past Sunday’s NYTBR, “The Well-Tended Bookshelf,” made me think for a few moments.

Miller finds that the occasion of having to move and reorganize her book collection (which is formidable; she is, after all, the literary critic for Salon.com) forces her to consider what should stay and what should go, and she discusses what books mean to their owners, how books define their owners, and why some books stand the test of time.

I have plenty of thoughts on all of those, but what really grabbed me and stayed with me was in her last paragraph, when she reminds us of Dr. Johnson’s apercu that second marriages represent the triumph of hope over experience. “So, too, do my bookshelves,” writes Miller, referring to the fact that as long as she has some unread books, her time on this mortal coil has not expired. I was caught be the phrase “triumph of hope over experience,” because it seems to me that that holds a certain key for the entire publishing industry right now.

The experiences we are all having are bleak. Profits are down, and so are readers in general. But did any of us choose to be readers because it would make us financially solvent? We became readers because, my friends, of the hope embodied in the pages we read. The forms that hope take can be very different: escape, fame, solitude, theories, beauty… However, hope — “the thing with feathers,” according to Emily Dickinson — leads us to believe in something, and for most people reading this post, that something was books.

So reading the NYT again today, I was glad to see this. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Hope, that feathered something, has a way of being contagious. Please take a look at the link and tell me what you think. No quiz — just more dialogue…

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Times are very, very tough for everyone, and they’re quite bleak for the media. Every day it seems there are more layoffs — those are expected in a bad economy. But for the media, along with the layoffs comes changes in information dissemination. Some publications are shutting down completely; others are going web-only; still others are fighting to stay open by combining and collaborating.

As for books and publishing: Well, if you believe everything you read, it’s all bad. Bad, bad, bad, and worse. Soon we will have no bookstores, no books, no publishing companies, no readers, and no cultural life whatsoever.

Fortunately, even if I learned nothing else from my liberal-arts education, I learned that you can’t believe everything you read, especially not simultaneously. Just because two writers both make cogent arguments doesn’t mean they’re both writer, or that either one of them is right. So take what I say here with a shaker full of salt.

I’m off to New York this morning for a few days of literary events and meetings. Tonight I’m attending The Moth Ball, which exists to celebrate a storytelling culture that seems to be exploding. People want stories; it’s a human imperative. On Wednesday evening, I’ll go to the National Book Awards. Several colleagues have said “Oh, BORING” — but I can’t find anything boring when it comes to celebrating the written version of stories, especially with some wonderful titles on the shortlist.

On Thursday, I’ll be interviewing Julia Glass about her new novel, I See You Everywhere – and you’ll get to read that interview here next week!

Finally, on Friday, I’ll make one of my regular appearances on NY1, the cable channel, this time to talk about books for holiday gift-giving, before heading over to Barnes & Noble.com to have a meeting about my new gig hosting their Center Stage book club. (This week we’re chatting with bestselling author Anne Rice, in case you’d care to ask her a question!)

So, you see, from my (admittedly limited) perspective, books aren’t dead. Neither are stories. What might be dead? Print on paper. But it’s going to be a long time before it’s completely gone.

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