Hollywood is a town awash in hyphenates Despite his Nobel Prize in Literature, Turkey's Orhan Pamuk feels he's still not part of the literary inner circle. But some people just refuse to come in out of the cold. Sure people love Apple and Cartier, but what about stuff that isn't in the luxury goods market? So how about the spell of history floating on Cold River
I felt I was out of Mars Reader's Report Confessions
Esther Allen has a long piece in the Guardian about her work writing reader's reports on books written in or translated into French or Spanish. Her passion for her work is palpable: "Writing the reports is a time-consuming, often frustrating, and always financially unprofitable pastime, and there can't be many of us willing to do it; sometimes two or three different publishers in sequence will, unbeknownst to each other, send me the same book to evaluate. I often wonder - particularly when a deadline is looming - why I do reader's reports at all.
Going along with that story she tells recently of the "same book sent to me by three different publishers. I imagined and pitied the poor agent, doggedly sending it back out after each new rejection, not knowing that my report had already shot it down. Then I found myself sitting in that agent's office. I was the one who'd brought up the difficulty of getting foreign books published in English. 'Yes!' he exclaimed. 'I've been submitting this wonderful novel everywhere' - he named the title - 'and no one will do it!' My heart sank."
• Financially unprofitable pastime; [As the writers strike enters its third week, I think the future belongs to a tantalizing new hyphenate: the writer-entrepreneur. Whoever enters the fray will still need writers to create this new content. So writers should keep their eyes on the prize. Getting a few more pennies of digital loot is just a beginning, not an end. The ultimate goal should be finding ways to own a piece of your own work. Come on, writers, script your futures; The life of the modern writer is complex. Starving alone in a garret wasn't always pleasant, but it was easy Let's Face It]
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• · For a different counterpoint, there's Harper UK ceo Victoria Barnsley promoting their not-yet-launched Authonomy.co.uk as the new new thing to the Independent, though at this stage it sounds a lot like a new gloss on the old Time Warner Book Group's defunct iPublish. My view is more people want to write a book than read a book. Barnsley On New Site, Capturing Readers;
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