Shelving the Matter
I just learned that it is
National Novel Writing Month. Almost 80,000 people have gotten together online and each will try to write 50,000 words this month. I guess that's one way to approach writing, and a good approach for people who want to tell that one story.
Publishers Weekly ran my piece on
marketing and categories this Monday. The Wall Street Journal had an article about books shelved by race that got a lot of buzz on the net. Author
Monica Jackson blogs about this and provides comments and a link to the WSJ article.
You want your books to stand out from the pack, but do you really want them segregated by race/ethnicity? I'm not the only one to find this disturbing. It's as if the booksellers are saying that a novel by a writer who is "other" couldn't appeal to anyone else. The twist to this is that books shelved out of the mainstream fiction category do have a better chance of selling more, simply because they don't get lost in the crowd.
Good news:
Latinidad newsletter named
Happy Hour at Casa Dracula as one of the best reads for 2006.
Bad News: Sony is pushing its
eReader. Yes, I know the tech people who don't like books anyway have been looking for a way to eliminate books. So you pay over $300 for a flat screen that can store up to 80 books. Can you drop this in the tub, grab it out quickly, wipe it with a towel and continue to read? Can you dog-ear a corner, then shove it in your jacket pocket? Can you swat an annoying fly with it? If the answer to any of these questions is "no," then why bother?
So when some non-swattable bug in the system wipes out the 80 books you paid for and downloaded, and you're on the phone for an hour with some tech support person in another hemisphere who calls herself "Tiffany" trying to fix your eReader, don't complain to me.