This Week! Books! Abbreviated again!
Apple, E-book Publishers in EU Crosshairs Over E-book Sales
Justice Department Investigating E-book Pricing
I Write in Multiple Genres – How Do I Choose An Agent?
5 Reasons Why I Resent My Nook
The Bad Sex in Fiction Award Goes to David Guterson
Readmill Goes Public: Is the Future of Books Social?
Lev Grossman on Being in College and Wanting to Be a Writer (via The Millions)
John Green: The Internet is an Extension of Your Work
Wells Tower: I Am No Longer Doing Interviews on the Internet
How Do Writers Choose Pen Names?
The 10 Best Amazon Reviews. Ever.
10 More of the Best Amazon Reviews. Ever. (via John Ochwat)
And finally, this is basically the most amazing video in the history of the universe:
Have a great weekend!
That was gross.
But links are good!
Darnit, Nathan. Some of us are trying to work here.
You have a bad habit of ruining my Friday mornings! 🙂
This is a great list. One more on the subject of choosing pen names can be found here:
http://www.shelfactualization.com/2011/12/art-of-pseudonym.html
Loved the Amazon winners. Hilarious!
And the Octopus video explains a lot about the Watcher in the Water!
That octopus video is cool!
I love that octopus video. It was fascinating in an icky way.
I was totally going to buy that uranium, until I saw that review mentioning product shrinkage after only 4.47 billion years.
Ah, the famous Amazon review of the three-wolf moon tee shirt. One of the great classics! Thanks for sharing. 🙂
So there is a scientific basis for the plot of the movie "Killer Octopi: Tentacles Of Death"…??? I take back what I said about it. By the way your video selections don't show up when I get your post via email. Thanks!
Here is a species of octopus that lives in trees.
http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/
I'm surprised Franzen wasn't on the bad sex list. I've read parodies of his sex scenes that were hysterical.
Hey, Nathan, it's your old buddy, Mike, speaking. I think it's high time that somebody said this to YOU:
Have a great weekend!
I love seeing that sentence on the Friday blog. All healthy people should at least try to have a great weekend.
I saw an Octopus walk once. It had gotten loose at a Chinese street market and was crawling through the other seafood bins.
Yay! Links, lovely links. Thanks, Nathan!
I read them, and I'm going to comment on them.
a. I'm very happy that the Justice Dept. and EU are investigating the collusion between publishers and Apple. I think that agency model IS price fixing, and thank goodness for government regulation of corporations, because corporations can't be trusted. Yay, e-book oversight! Very interesting to see this play out.
b. In terms of Rachelle Gardner's multiple genre thing, I'm sorry I don't agree. I know her intenstion is to be a good guide, but her main point is that someone can't market and social network for multiple books in different genres. Okay. But I think it's still important to remember that authors are best designed to WRITE books, not SELL them. There has to be a better solution than stopping an author from writing in order to have them focus on a marketing strategy that has not been proven to actually work anyway.
b. Cute article by Sharon Vakin. Love the picture. Someday, though, we'll wax nostalgic about e-readers and how they felt to hold in our hands, now that books are microwaved directly into our brains.
c. I wasn't sure if David G. got the Bad Sex award for the topic or for the writing. But since I have no intention of reading an extended sex scene between a son and mother, I guess I'll never know.
d. Didn't really understand how the Readmill site was different. But I like the creativity of new ways to form internet book clubs! Yay!
e. I think the Grossman article has a good point. Effort, stamina, refusal to quit huge ingredients to success.
f. John Green's article was interesting. I liked what he said about creating a project to involve people. I don't agree, though, that the problem in the future will be to be noticed. Not if you have a good product. Don't underestimate consumers, I think.
g. Why is Towers not doing interviews? The article didn't say.
h. Eeek! This poor writer found a pen name because her real name "Alison" is too middle-aged. OMG. I don't know where to start. Sheesh. Is there any actual research, btw, that the name of the author influences sales? Or is that just something someone made up because it sounded like the type of ageism and sexism that should be perpetrated by major corporations, and therefore, a good thing to do?
I. Those Amazon reviews were the funniest thing, ever. I laughed and laughed. Thank you for posting them!
J. Awesome video. I really think the Octopus wanted to eat the people. You could tell it was disappointed when it turned back.
Okay, that's it. Thanks for letting me share all my OPINIONS on these interesting links, Nathan!
One of the world's universal mysteries, for me, will always be why you get no comments on Fridays.