The Guardian
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Writers Are Poor
A British study has confirmed that professional writers aren’t making very much money, and worse, that earnings for writers have fallen 29% since 2005. A survey of 2,500 British authors found median annual income at just £11,000 ($18,800) and only…
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An Author By Any Other Name
Authors sometimes choose pseudonyms for marketing purposes or in order to rebrand themselves after some catastrophic career decision. Sometimes, they just want anonymity. In the case of Sarah Hall (the journalist), because another Sarah Hall (the Man Booker-shortlisted author) had…
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An Agnostic, Chortling Freelance Space-Yahoo
Amid all the meanings and uses that give a word its weight, it’s easy to forget that language is ultimately a system of arbitrary signs. Lexicographer Paul Dickson’s new book “Authorisms—Words Wrought by Writers” chronicles some of the most dynamic…
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Amazon Opens Eastern Front
As Amazon and Hachette continue to battle it out, the online retailer has opened an eastern front, delaying shipments from Bonnier, a German publishing group. The German Publishers and Booksellers Association has filed an anti-trust complaint. Amazon, of course, denies the accusation.…
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Digital Age Changes Writing
Technology has changed the way writers write, and that change is not just about the rise of e-books. Composition in a digital world is much more malleable and fluid, and changes in methodology alter the structure of sentences and words.…
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Digital Age Fuels Sci-Fi Short Stories
The digital era has brought on a new golden age of science fiction. Electronic books, self-driving cars, and video phones may not seem too fictional these days, but technology like the Internet has empowered all sorts of new distribution methods…
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Takin’ It to the Tweets
Last Friday, the CIA officially joined Twitter with a joke: We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet. But the New York Review of Books wasn’t laughing. The highly respected literary journal staged a protest, rapidly…
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The Poetry Archive Anew
Poetryarchive.org, the online poetry resource founded by retired British poet laureate Andrew Motion and the recording producer Richard Carrington a decade ago, has just been relaunched. In the Guardian, Motion talks about the origins of the website and it new redesign: Our original…
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Rumpus Round-Up: All the Abramson News Fit to Print
Jill Abramson, the first woman to head the New York Times as executive editor, was abruptly fired Wednesday and replaced by managing editor Dean Baquet. The New Yorker attempted to explain why, with the leading theory being Abramson’s discovery several…
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The Literary Novel is Dead! Long Live the Literary Novel!
It happens every now and then that we find someone toasting (or mourning) the death of the novel—this time, it’s Will Self’s turn. “How do you think it feels to have dedicated your entire adult life to an art form…
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Lit Fic Is Just Another Genre
Jane Austen wrote for money. She also made readers laugh. So why are her books considered literature rather than genre fiction? Clever marketing, claims Elizabeth Edmondson over at the Guardian. Despite many attempts to define “literary fiction” as something dry…
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Pink Books and Blue Books
Across the pond, the Let Books Be Books campaign is circulating a petition calling on publishers of children’s books to stop labeling books according to gender and to “allow children to choose freely what kinds of stories and activity books interest…