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MAILING LIST: I just started a mailing list for my publishing company. Will mail out every 2 months and will include excerpts from my Robert’s Roundup columns and other random stuff. https://booktoot.club/@nagletx. (Mastodon) and nagletx.bsky.social. (Blue Sky).
My Personville Press sells literary titles (mainly short stories) at budget prices (and several freebies). Gradually I have been doing “elevator pitch” videos on YouTube summarizing several of these ebooks in three minutes or so.
Abbreviations: KU means Kindle Unlimited and NYP means “Name Your Price” (that’s an option on Smashwords and other booksellers). If you’d like to submit an ebook to me for review or mention in this column, see my instructions here. Here is my article about methods and search queries I use to locate ebook deals. See also: Indie Author Spotlight, Interviews by RJN,
Alphabetized Book Lists! This may sound like an obvious thing to do, but for my last Robert’s Roundup, I decided to alphabetize all the ebooks by author’s last name. I don’t have anything against alphabetization per se, but at the same time, I think that it favors the Adams over the Zelenskis. Actually I didn’t think too much about it, but eventually found it to be really really annoying to constantly be double-checking that I didn’t already mention a title (I have made that mistake several times before).
Rant: AI Authors
I saw a video of a small ebook distributor complaining about the number of AI-produced ebooks being submitted, and I guess that KDP and other ebookstores are experiencing the same problem. Today, an ad for one of my press’s ebooks was going to run on an ebook newsletter, but as it turns out, it appears alongside an “author” of sexy ebooks who published 10 ebooks in one year. (Humorously, the author photo on Amazon is a photorealistic portrait of a nude man with dangling penis. How on earth can real authors compete with the torrent of polished but low-quality ebooks being published today?
I am actually fairly tolerant about using AI tools to produce stories as long as you are upfront about what is being done. For example, I think it makes perfect sense for an interactive story to be AI-assisted for some of the story branches — as long as a human supervisors and monitors for quality.
But it becomes more difficult to advertise or to browse through titles if low quality AI titles are competing for your attention.
Update. Now it appears that Draft2Digital is charging authors and publishers $12 a year who list their books because of the added burden of having to vet and weed out AI titles. Major bummer.
Indie Author Spotlight
the
Under the Radar
The View from Highway 1 by Michael J. Arlen. (W) 1976 essay collection by a noted TV critic.
A Better Angel: Stories by Chris Adrian.
The King’s Rifle: A Novel by Biyi Bandele.
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ All-Time Greatest Hits a Novel by Mark Binelli.
Jade Cat a Novel by Suzanne Brogger
Serpent Box a Novel by Vincent Louis Carella
Acceptance: A Novel by Susan Coll. Satirical story about college admissions.
Cat’s Pajamas and Witch’s Milk by Peter De Vries.
Hibernaculum by Anthony Doyle.
Martin Duberman Reader.
St. Ivo by Joanna Hershon. (Home,) From a NYT review: “The book does not grant us a neat, circular ending, and Hershon is not afraid of ambiguity. But for me, these aspects function as a part of the novel’s charm: fiction full of complexity, devoted to reality.” Other writings 7 Fascinating books about cults. Writing and Improv Classes, For COVID reading, she recommended Everything is Under Control: A Memoir with Recipes by Phyllis Grant.
King and Raven by Cary James. Authorian tales.
Facades by Eric Lundgren. First novel about a missing opera singer and her husband’s attempt to find her. (interview)
Astonishing Splashes of Color by Claire Morrall. (W) Booker finalist about a quirky middle-aged lady coming to terms with death, miscarriage, marital issues. Title is Peter Pan reference to a woman who has “never has grown up.”
Bedlam Burning by Geoff Nicholson.
Waterloo by Karen Olsson. (Austin-based author).
Everything belongs to the future by Laurie Penny. (Bio, substack)
Scruffy Little Devils by Andras Polgar
40 Sonnets by Don Paterson. (Home, ). Lots of video readings and lectures: Readings, Sonnet Structure, Saints Talk: Why Bad Metaphors Destroy Everything, 1 hour reading,
You Wanna Get Outta Here by Andrew W.G. Rees. Canadian poet.
The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection by Deborah Rudacille. (Home, W), Informative and thought-provoking nonfiction book by a science author who graduated from the same JHU writing program that I did. All her titles sound great.
Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling by Lionel Trilling, Adam Kirsch. (NYT review) Includes letters to A. Ginsberg, Barzun, Edmund Wilson, Sontag, Saul Bellow, etc.
Blink and It’s Gone
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor.
Wind-Up Bird Chronicles: a novel by Haruki Murakami.
Endling a Novel by Maria Reva. Prize-winning novel
Mabinogion Tetralogy: Prince of Annwn, Children of Lyr, Song of Rhiannon by Evangeline Walton. This translation of the famous Welsh tetralogy (which inspired Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series of children’s books) is supposed to be highly readable.
Library Purchases/Printed books
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Creative Commons/Freebies
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Literary Articles and Essays
The Baffler has a long series of articles about the lack of financial rewards for the writing profession. Depressing and sobering because the contributors were by most standards extremely successful for their books, yet barely made enough to survive.
NYT has a long series about How to Be Cultured. These are just annotated recommendation lists which by virtue of it being the NYT, seems important. (Time Magazine used to devote special issues on similar themes). The value comes from the big names they are able to corral who will contribute their favorites, with occasional surprises here and there. Here are AIDS-era novels, Books that Encapsulate 5 Countries, American Characters and Unsung works by Famous Authors. Also pretty clever: a list of book recommendations for each decade of life. For me, a 60 year old, It suggests Kindred by Octavia Butler and two public domain works by Nella Larsen: Passing and Quicksand.
Rant
On a self-publish reddit, a film critic and new novelist wondered why book reviewers respond to unsolicited review requests with requests for payment. He mentioned that such a practice would be unheard of in the film world. I wrote a long response:
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That is not a common practice — though it does happen. More common is that book review services will charge a sum (50-500$) to do a sponsored review.
Reading and reviewing a book takes a lot more time and effort than writing a review of a movie. At the same time, there’s a shortage of bona fide book critics who will read and review books compared to the number of books being published.
I’m sure you know already that paying gigs for film criticism are rare compared to what it was 20 years ago. It’s even more rare for book criticism. Also, a higher percent of book critics are authors themselves — who often have better things to do than write reviews. Imagine if the sizable percent of people who wrote movie reviews were other film directors and screenplay writers.
There are certainly ethical challenges in asking for money for reviews. But I certainly do not begrudge the meager compensation that book critics (or movie critics) feel that they are entitled to for their efforts. In many ways doing publicity for movies is a lot easier than doing publicity for books. Movies have shiny actors willing to promote the projects and easier access to multimedia tools. Books usually have just the author himself to talk about a book project. In the podcast world, I guess that authors make excellent guests — and that might put them on the same level as movie people. Generally though, book reviews are more crucial to a book’s success than movie reviews are to a movie’s success.
Another thing. Although some movies have esoteric audiences, sometimes book genres are difficult for readers and even sophisticated readers to talk intelligently about. Reading a book that uses techniques or themes alien to you can feel like torture. But with movies, all you have to do is turn on the video player for 2 hours and pay attention and watch people and landscapes and listen to the soundtrack. I can hate the movie itself and still find the experience of watching the movie to be pleasant enough or relatively painless. I love books, and I finish a much higher percent of movies than books.
(By the way, I looked up the original poster, His name is Marty MacDaid (Home, Substack) and he has written Murder in Beltova, (KU) a murder mystery with a Baltic theme.
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