Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Why We Need Bookish

Book-ish by Sky Sloderbeck
Last night, a service two years in the making launched. The web site, Bookish, is the brainchild of three publishing powerhouses: Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster. That seems like a lot of big fish with hands in one little fish pie, so to help me remember who is backing this exciting start-up, I'm going to call this powerhouse Simon the hachette-wielding penguin.

The initial buzz on Twitter was positive:




I ran over to Bookish and played with it for a while, and sure enough, Simon the hachette-wielding penguin may have hit on a very good thing here. It's barely a day old, and there's already a great selection of books available, as well as some exclusives like a joint interview with crime fiction author Michael Connelly and suspense author Michael Koryta, an essay from Eat, Pray, Love's author Elizabeth Gilbert, and my favorite, a handful of book reviews courtesy of The Onion.

But what makes Bookish different from Amazon? Or Goodreads? A lot, actually. Amazon may have the lion's share of the market on book sales, but people value convenience, and if readers head to Bookish to look for recommendations, they may buy through Bookish since they're already there. Plus, Amazon isn't exactly known for making it easy (or fun) to find new books to read. Sure there are lists and "Viewed by Others," but those aren't tailored to your current reading style.

At Bookish, you can enter up to four books and get back recommendations on new books you could try. As the web site grows and more books are added, this part of the service will surely get better and more accurate.

And while Bookish may have shelves like Goodreads, the simplicity of those shelves suggests that they are meant as a place to keep track of books you've read so that you don't inadvertently purchase them again. Maybe (I'm hoping) Bookish will eventually use that data to deliver even better recommendations, in the same vein as Netflix: the more you read and rate, the better the recommendations are. But let's give that particular feature time. They are only a day old, after all.

So why do we need Bookish? Instead of thinking of it as a replacement for or competition against Amazon and Goodreads, it might be better to think of Simon the hachette-wielding penguin's digital baby as a tool to use alongside them. With a clean, fast interface, content-rich author pages, and author exclusives, Bookish is a nirvana for readers - a stripped down and beautiful way to find and enjoy books.

Monday, February 4, 2013

OCD About Your Library?

Home Library by Sky Sloderbeck
I have a confession: I have an addiction to cozy home libraries. My ideal library would have an old world explorer vibe, complete with a globe mounted in a brass-and-wood stand, a brass telescope, and a taxidermied mountain lion stalking a taxidermied big horn ram. It would also have a massive fireplace and at least three of the four walls would be lined with mahogany built-in bookcases. And those bookcases would be filled with books, yet have just enough shelf space left to accommodate any additions.

My current library attempts to mimic that dream library vibe, with mahogany lookalike bookcases on every wall, stuffed animals of the teddy bear kind propped on the bookshelves and the bookcases filled (to overflowing) with books. My Goodreads profile shows I only have 188 books, but I'm fairly certain that I have closer to 500 (many are too old to be scanned using their app and I will have to enter them by hand).

Ideally, I'd love to get all of them entered on Goodreads so that I could use it as a searchable database of my books, and then organize them on their physical shelves to match their Goodreads shelves, but until then, I have rudimentary organization going on. Horror over here. SciFi over there. Memoir up there. Children's books down there. Series are grouped together and placed in chronological (publication) order, but that's it.

And it works, in a sense.

Every once in a while, though, I stare at my bookshelves and know that as soon as I add a new horror book or if I purge some of the books given to me that I know I'll never read,  I'll have to reorganize. That thought is depressing when there are so many books to deal with.

So now my questions: If you have a glut of books, how do you organize them? If you organize by genre, how do you organize books that cross genres? How do you organize anthologies? And how much space do you leave per shelf so that you can add new books (or do you pack the shelves tightly and worry about that later)?

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Has It Really Been a Year?

Malayan Tiger Airbrush by Sky Sloderbeck
If you look at the post immediately preceding this one ("Correlation and Causation: Regarding Gender Discrimination Claims in Publishing"), you might notice that it's from March 13, 2012. With red-faced embarrassment,  I have to admit that I wasn't as diligent in backing up my blog as I should have been.

What followed was a FUBAR moment with GoDaddy, their demand that I pay an outrageous sum of money to have my data retrieved, and the loss of my two-year-old writing blog. Before my last major site update - which was in 2012 - I backed up my site and so was able to salvage those 20-odd blog posts, but my entire "Life of an Intern" Series (a blog series that shared my experiences as an intern at a publishing company), some writing, and a few craft posts were lost.

And that brings us to the present. I've decided on Blogger because it's a Google product and they have yet to let me down. Plus, for a single mom and full-time college student, the hosting being free is a nice perk.

So if you knew me from my old blog, Literary Crux, welcome back! If you are new, welcome! I hope you join in on the occasional writing exercises and find my posts entertaining and helpful. I look forward to meeting you in the comments!

Why not start now? Leave me a message saying hi and the kinds of writing- and reading-related posts you'd like to see here. I'd love inspiration from my readers!

Oh, and are you wondering about the tiger above? No, it doesn't have anything to do with this post, but I've decided that with a new blog should come a new "feature," if you will. I have been creating a bit of art recently and I'm going to use that art, in addition to my own photography, in my blog posts. It sure saves headaches on copyright issues. I hope you enjoy the new blog and the new art!

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Correlation and Causation: A Rebuttal

Correlation and Causation: Regarding Gender Discrimination Claims in Publishing

 My cousin shared a Huffington Post article with me and I thought I'd share it - and my thoughts on it - here. After all of the courses I've taken in Women's Studies, this article and the statistics it presents concerns me, however, the analytical side of me wonders if this article is forgetting that "correlation does not imply causation."

Are Book Publishers To Blame For Gender Discrimination?
[The Huffington Post] took a look at all of the books published in 2011 by four of the major imprints - Knopf, Crown, Little, Brown and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux - and tallied the authors by gender. These publishers were chosen for their focus on literary fiction - the types of books typically reviewed by places like The New York Times Book Review and The Atlantic. We only included hardcovers in our count for the same reason.

What [they] found (see below) was that the gender ratios of books published by these imprints are in a few cases almost identical to those of the publications cited in Vida's survey [Ed. Note: Vida's survey showed that reviews of literary fiction written by men far outpaced reviews of literary fiction written by women]. If the gender representation in major publications is to change, and we believe it should, then perhaps that also requires a shift either in the mindset of the more "literary" publishers, or a broadening of the books and publishers whose work is covered by the media.
Books published in 2011 by Alfred A. Knopf
Pie chart by Huffington Post.


This is a big claim to make just based on publishing numbers.

There has been a struggle between the gender binary for centuries upon centuries and only in the past 100 years have women finally been gaining a voice, especially in the publication of literary fiction. So do these statistics reflect discrimination or do they reflect progress? Additionally, could these statistics represent an underlying discrimination outside of the publishing realm that somehow prevents women from even writing the same amount of literary fiction as men, therefore limiting publishers to submissions from men and women that reflect the publishing statistics?

The only way to really get a better idea of why the numbers are so apparently biased towards male literary fiction authors is to have access to the data on the actual manuscript submissions these publishers receive. Two examples to illustrate how this information is important:

(1) Publisher A receives 232 submissions in a year from women and 192 submissions in the same year from men. This publisher accepts and publishes 58 from the women and 96 from the men. That is a 1-in-4 acceptance/publication rate for women and 1-in-2 acceptance/publication rate for men. In this instance, there is likely a problem at the publishing level.

(2) Publisher A receives 116 submissions in a year from women and 192 submissions in the same year from men. This publishers accepts and publishes 58 from the women and 96 from the men. That is a 1-in-2 acceptance/publication rate for BOTH groups. In this instance, there is no discrimination occurring at the publishing level.

Without the submission/acceptance/rejection data, this article is just a baseless jab at publishers. The numbers the article provides ARE important to show that female literary fiction authors are being published at a much lower rate than their male counterparts, but to suggest that "book publishers [are] to blame" is a bit reactionary and thoughtless without further data, in my opinion.

Note: The two scenarios above are very basic and the reality is probably much more complex, but I wanted to keep the math simple in order to make my point clearly.