A lot of things happened this week in publishing, folks, but I haven't heard a one of them, because the pedophile guide hijacked the airwaves. Yep, that's right, there's a pedophile guide on Amazon that was self published straight to the Kindle, and people are mad (not surprisingly). And you know what? After selling only one copy, all of the media attention gave the book a 101,000% sales boost. What? Tons of media attention put money directly in the pocket of a man who wrote a guide to being a pedophile? This is my shocked face. Now can we stop paying attention to this guy and handing him our money? (Amen. — E)
Plus, other things happened too. John Grisham sold 70,000 copies of his new e-book in one week. And I'm happy he has our money! Temple Grandin has a new book coming out, which should be faboosh, and Brittany Murphy's mom is writing a tell-all, which just feels icky already. Maybe she can use some of these writing tips from Vonnegut. Or maybe we should all just watch literary movies this holiday season instead of thinking about her book, or read the most popular authors on Facebook. Or, hey, we can read what George Bush read in office.
Well, I'm off to France, where e-books have fixed prices—I can still read the new New York Times e-book bestseller list there. Until next week!
I love Bagombo Snuff Box and Vonnegut's list of tips. I love that his last one is basically "ignore the rules", but there's still an implication that one has to know what they are in order to ignore them well. So purely Vonnegut.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty surprised that Stephenie Meyer didn't rank higher on that Facebook list, since her series is still so huge. Still, it tends to be huge within a certain segment of the population, while I could see some of the other authors having wider appeal. I am surprised she outranks authors like Jane Austen and J.K. Rowling, though. (Really? REALLY??) The comments seem to reveal some oddities about how the data was collected, though.
Surprise, surprise--the cops are investigating this guy while trying to protect him from the OTHER crazies sending him death threats. BTW--the book got pulled. It's no longer on Amazon. No clue whether Amazon pulled it or the author did, but it is most definitely gone.
ReplyDeleteGood advice from Vonnegut and yay, I look forward to having more access to Grandin's quirky genius.
ReplyDeleteI'm buying all books for presents this year. Cheaper than electronics and more vitamin-rich for the brain.