In yesterday’s post, I noted how I wished Rusch had listed her sources in her article. In response, Martin Lewis (ninebelow) linked me the following:

Book sales are outperforming the wider economy, according to the latest sales data from Nielsen BookScan. For the eight weeks to 21st February, volume sales grew by 0.1% to £32.4m, compared to the same period in 2008, while the value of books sold declined by 1% to £238.6m.

The volume growth has come despite a slumping wider retail market, the continued fallout from the collapse of Entertainment UK late last year, and adverse weather conditions earlier this month. The Confederation of British Industry said this week that retail sales fell heavily in February although the fall was not as marked as in the previous month.

Though the market remains marginally down on 2008, it is considerably ahead of a comparable period in 2007. In the eight weeks to 21st February, volume sales are up 5.2% compared with the same period in 2007 and up 5.6% in value terms.

The figures have led publishers to be cautiously optimistic about the start to the year. Garry Prior, group sales director for Random House Group, said: “[We] had a solid start to the year with a number of books topping the bestsellers lists, but February is proving a bit tougher.”

A spokeswoman for Hachette UK said: “Hachette has had a good start to the year: sales of Stephenie Meyer [titles] are outstanding and this week’s bestseller lists underline the strength of the rest of Hachette UK’s publishing in the first couple of months of 2009.”

Bloomsbury executive director Richard Charkin, said: “In difficult times people seem to be turning to quality, reliability and good value and books represent all those things.”

At HarperCollins, a spokeswoman said there had been “a couple of stand-out books in different areas of the market”, notably Endal and Wetlands.

However, there was a warning this week that the publishing industry could be a vulnerable area within the media sector. Andy Viner, head of media for BDO Stoy Hayward, said: “The bookselling side is more vulnerable than others in the media sector because it has a higher fixed cost base, and is under more price pressure from the supermarkets—which will continue and get more intense.”

However, he struck one note of optimism. “A number of players will come through this stronger,” he said. “The shape of the industry and the number of players will probably change over the next two to three years. If that gives some power back to publishers, that will be a good thing.”

. . . but retailers remain cautious.

The growth in volume sales has not stopped retailers from warning of uncertain times ahead for the book market.

Book supply has been affected by EUK’s collapse and problems at wholesaler Bertrams/THE, as it continues to search for a new owner.

Kes Nielsen, head of book buying at Amazon.co.uk, said: “It’s not easy out there and these are uncertain times.” He said that Amazon.co.uk had benefited from movie adaptations of books, with titles such as The Reader and Watchmen selling well.

He added: “There’s an opportunity for companies that concentrate on the basics and keep customers happy to do ok. If we continue to provide great availability and pricing then we will put in a credible performance.”

At Tesco, category manager David Cooke said: “Our share is still down on last year because we have missed out on some range sales but our share with key titles is where it should be.”

However, the independent sector reported a better than expected start to the year. Ian Nicholson, owner of Alison’s of Tewkesbury, said: “The picture is not as bleak as newscasters make out.” Inga Sweetman, of City Books, Hove, Sussex added: “We’re very perky and very upbeat.”

I linked the whole piece because I couldn’t find a pull quote that would best sum it up.

My first response is to make a connection between Rusch’s comments over movies, and how this article actually notes that some of the best selling books are those related to movies. Beyond that however, no one seems to be saying that things will pick up in a recession, but rather that the book industry isn’t doing so bad, even though the industry is marginally down than the previous year.

Anyhow, make of it what you will.

Link.

The reason I say this is a new golden age of short fiction, especially for SF/F writers, is quite simple. There are more markets now than there have been since the brief boom years of the early 1950s. From the podcast markets to on-line markets like Jim Baen’s Universe to the tried and true digest magazines, the SF short fiction reader has more places to go than ever before.

…

Writers and readers alike are terrified that their favorite short fiction venues will vanish. A few will. Most won’t. Because people read more during tough economic times. Think of this: A hardcover book costs $20 to $25. An evening at the movies for a family of four costs $20-30 depending on what region of the country you’re in, and that doesn’t include snacks. The movie gives roughly two hours of pleasure (you hope) for your entertainment dollar.

The book gives days of pleasure, depending on how fast you read. And you can loan it to everyone in the family and all your friends as well. If you don’t buy a hardcover, if you’ve cut back to only buying paperbacks, then you get the same kind of experience for $8, a vast savings over a movie.

People pay for cheap entertainment during tough times. The movie industry took off in the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression. In this severe economic crisis, Hollywood has just announced the first billion dollar January on record. Amazon.com is the only company I know of to announce sales figures for the fourth quarter of 2008 that were higher than expected. Everyone else in retail announced losses. Libraries in the Greater Los Angeles area, according to the CBS Evening News, had 2 million more visitors in 2008 than they did in 2007 (from 16 million people to 18 million people, a figure projected to rise even more in 2009).

People will read and they will read more than they have before. Quotes throughout trade journals from industry professionals continually state that they plan no cutbacks in output in 2009, because they all know (and repeatedly state) that book sales go up in a recession.

The above comes from an article by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and overall it’s a bit silly, especially when she starts telling the recently unemployed that if they feel guilty or impotent, they should do volunteer work.

The real interesting comment is in her final line that I quoted, however, about sales going up in a recession. I rather wish she’d linked sources and quotes for it, because I’d be kind of interested in reading that; also, I’ve spent too much time teaching essays, and obviously too much time writing them, and now think that every statement needs a long collection of references to get it going. Also, her comparison between books and film is kind of one that is faintly ridiculous, and doesn’t aid her statement. Film has a whole advertising industry of books, music, television, radio, and whatever else you got, to support it in a variety of ways. It also deliberately markets itself to the age group with the highest disposable income, and that age group of teenagers and early twenties people, are not reading as much as they watch flicks (and honestly, because I spend my time with them, they don’t really want to read; for most of them, trashy flicks, video games, and drinking is more interesting than reading). Anyhow, I’m not focusing on that, since what I’m interested in is that book sales go up during a recession.

Part of my interest comes the fact that, from the people I know, and just how I viewed the world, that I expected things to go down. I’m reasonably sure that it will for some people, but I’ve had conversations in which people insisted that mid-list writers would fall away, that new writers would find their breaks harder to come by, that publishing houses weren’t buying much, that they were scaling back staff… and while I thought that some of it was doom and gloom, some of it I just figured was part of the deal, and that yes, things would get cut back. I didn’t think it would be doom, or gloom, or that it would be the end of publishing EVER, but at the same time, I didn’t expect it to go up. So, like I said, I really do wish Rusch had linked the quotes for the recession part, but maybe I’ll just see what I can track down.

I just stumbled across the BBC’s blog on the first 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency and this is the first post I read:

Rajini Vaidyanathan: Is all the stress of being president going to Barack Obama’s head, quite literally?

Several news websites have noted that the president’s hair has been getting as white as his house.

During the campaign, a theory was doing the rounds that President Obama had been grey for sometime, but at the start of the campaign had started dying his hair. His barber dismissed the suggestion, however.

Whatever the truth of the matter, these days Mr Obama seems quite content to acknowledge his changing hair colour

A few months ago he told a campaign rally that the “the grey is coming quick,” and “by the time I’m sworn in, I will look the part.”

Perhaps those who are splitting hairs (excuse the pun), about the president’s more distinguished look should relax. If he’s happy, then what’s the big deal?

According to the bio, this is Vaidyanathan commenting on the use of the New Media, which apparently means discussing his hair like she’s suddenly found herself on the most vapid and mind numbing of celebrity stalker shows.

The post probably wouldn’t be so bad if she hadn’t ended with the, ‘if he’s happy,’ part, and had instead decided to focus on the idea that there could be a shift in Obama’s image, and the hair change is a representation of this. She could have focused on what kind of signals grey hair sends to an audience. It’s different for men and women–for women, grey hair signals a lack of sexuality, of moving beyond her prime, and other negative connotations. For men, however, it’s a signal of maturity, of intelligence, and even, in some cases, dignity. None of it has a shit of truth in it, beyond that some people with grey hair are intelligent and some aren’t sexy, but a shift by Obama to let the grey out, for example, could very well be part of giving the President some image credibility amongst the older voters in the States (the youth vote has probably wandered off now, to focus on something else). I remember reading an essay a long time ago about how people reacted to leaders who appeared older than those who appeared younger, and Obama’s ‘youth’, which made a nice political point against the much older McCain, could be no longer seen as an asset for him now.

Or, y’know, we could focus on the fashion, like Entertainment Tonight.

Link.

About ten, maybe more years ago, I read Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, a novel I don’t have much respect for at all.

One of the things I didn’t like about it was the narrative technique that Rice picked, which was for the narrator to essentially stand and tell his story through dialogue for the entire novel. Because there was nothing natural about the dialogue, I found the whole premise of the novel difficult to get into, and that, coupled with my general disinterest in vampires, did not mean that the novel did well for me. Now, you might think I’m going to launch into a slam of the book, but I’m not really–I barely remember it now, and the truth is that I don’t much care either way what the general opinion is of it. I’m sure some folk liked it. I’m sure some didn’t. What interested me, however, was the narrative technique that Rice used for the novel, that idea that you could place your narrator into a room and have him or her or it actually tell the story for eighty to ninety thousand words.

In a way, it’s really not that different to first person narratives, and it is entirely possible to put speech marks around any first person narrated novel and have what Rice did (though if I remember right, she used it for a twist at the end–though was that just the movie? Blonde Tom Cruise appears from behind a car seat to make out with a be-speckled Christian Slater. Also, I know Rice wasn’t the first to do it, but it was my first experience of it, and the failure of it always sat most interestingly for me). What the marks do, however, is draw attention to the fact that you are narrating, and make the jump from whatever base scene you’re in to the one your character is describing difficult. The reader–or at least, myself as a reader–has the feeling that he can see the strings, the moving parts, the details that form the story, the author behind the curtain. It’s a trick, of course, because what you are seeing is the author’s creation behind the screen of the creation’s creation, but in a way, the damage is done, and the eye is drawn to the breaks and faults, and you, as the reader, are aware that you are reading something, that you’re being lied too.

I’ve tried to write stories using this technique a few times. Mostly because I just like the challenge, and short stories are a good for narrative challenges, though I’m not sure I’ve ever been particularly successful. Certainly, the one time I thought I had it down reasonably, was a short story that I managed to sell three times, and which managed to never get published. The thing has long passed its used by date, so it sits in some file on my flash drive, a tiny relic that I’ll likely forget some time after I’ve finished this post. If I remember right, it concerned a man on fire telling the story of how he had become ignited. It dealt with Nazis, because everyone has to write a story about Nazis once, and if that’s not enough of a reason to consign it to the back of the flash drive, I don’t know what is. However, now that I’ve gotten into the writing of ‘Octavia E. Butler (A Remix)’, I’ve decided, in these early stages, to give the narrative structure a try again, and see if I can’t make it work, and make it work well.

I’m a terrible rewriter, at least that’s how I view myself. A week from now I might hate the structure and how it’s working, and change it to a mix of first and second person, because that’s also an option. I can do the same tricks with both the structures, and make the leaps that I have to do so for the story, which aims to use Butler’s body of work to give the form of the story. The leaps that I’m talking about have to do with the difficulty of marrying such books like Kindred, which is a time travel novel, to Dawn, a novel in which the human race has been long dead and an alien species is reviving them (in very simple ways, mind you; those descriptions skip everything interesting about the books). Anyhow, to bring those, and indeed, more, together, I’ve decided that what I need is a structure that allows me a bit of shifting and changing, though of course, the real concern is that in trying to pick a structure that does that I don’t want to end up with a piece in which the narrator is standing in a room. If I get the vibe that that is what is happening, though, I’ll just toss the structure and begin again, but until then…

Well, fuck.

It finally happened.

I got a speeding fine in a 40 zone.

How long ago did the NSW government bring them in? My memory is fuzzy, but it feels like at least two or three years, ever since some kids who didn’t look before crossing came into contact with a driver not paying attention, and we all got shafted over. I am, of course, talking about the forty zones around schools, and which, between 7.30 and 9.00 and 2.30 and 4.00, require you to slow down to a crawl so that you don’t accidentally hit a child who runs out into the street, perhaps while chasing a ball. For the first year that this was in place, everyone in Sydney, including children, laughed at this law, but then the government went and got annoying about the subject, and put in speed cameras in the area, thus enforcing the new rule. My daily amusement of frightening kids while doing fifty or sixty in a suburban street was now gone, I am sad to report, and I had to return to sitting stationary in a backstreet and selling them drugs, as per usual.

Anyhow, unfortunately, I don’t really pay attention to schools as I drive, and these forty zones can kind of sneak upon me (or you). More than once, I’ve found myself having to suddenly slow down so that I don’t get caught by the camera.

Way I figured, it was only a matter of time.

Shame that it cost me 135 dollars to be proven right. Perhaps ironically, I was caught doing 51, which was my attempt last week to dramatically stop the car before the camera as I entered the zone.

I saw Taken, the film that assures all over protective and paranoid parents that they are right, last night.

It stars a paunchy looking Liam Neeson and is directed by Pierre Morel, whose previous claim to fame is being a cinematographer in the Transporter. Perhaps more telling is that the film is co-written by Luc Besson, and falls into the collection of films that Besson has co written, and which have all been thrillers or action flicks, and with have offered standard, by the number plot lines and characters. The early spark of his career that gave us The Professional (or Leon), the story of an assassin and his relationship with a little girl, and The Last Combat, a post apocalyptic film in which no one speaks due to damaged vocal cords, has long gone; or perhaps they were anomalies, the kinks of someone working out the start of their career, and accidentally producing something of interest. Either way, we’re talking about Taken, and it’s nothing like those two, and is a very by the numbers kind of thing, though the trailer isn’t so bad.

The film concerns itself with Neeson’s daughter, who at seventeen, lives with her mother and step father, in a rich, rich, fucking rich, world in which girls get ponies for their birthdays. Neeson’s ex wife is played by Famke Janssen, who is probably best known as Jean Grey out of X-Men, and she spends most of this film coming down on Neeson while wearing a white sweater which can only stay on one of her shoulders. It doesn’t matter what scene she’s in: either the scene in which her daughter is abducted, or the scene in which she is returned, her left shoulder is usually on display to the audience. At times I wondered if there was suppose to be some symbolism to it. Perhaps this naked shoulder showed how raw, how emotional she was. Perhaps it revealed that when she was around her ex-husband, she could not cover up her hurt emotions. Perhaps, I finally realised, I shouldn’t watch films after teaching High School english the whole day. It’s bad enough that I had to watch Blade Runner, and that I spent yesterday learning about Heidegger for one stanza in a poem, and originally though of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, so I was all over the place.

It was a confusing day, yesterday.

Anyhow:

Taken itself isn’t a bad flick, though it’s villains are all Albanian or Middle Eastern, and are all selling and kidnapping young women, which is what happens to Neeson’s daughter. When she had her friend reach Paris, they get picked up by a guy at the airport, and once he shares a cab with them to their expensive apartment, calls in his Albanian buddies to kidnap them. Neeson, fortunately, is on the phone, and guides his daughter through the kidnapping, one of the few good scenes in the film that you can, fortunately, see in the trailer. As Neeson says to the kidnappers when they pick up the phone, he is a man with many violent talents, and he plans to kill them, to which they wish him the best, and the rest of the film unfolds pretty much as you think it would. At this point, however, I feel I should note that there is an unpleasant subtext amongst the two girls, one of who is not a virgin, and one of who is, that leaves its mark in the film. About half way through the film, Neeson finds the kidnappers, and the girl who isn’t a virgin is on a bed, dead; it’s fairly obvious that she has been raped, and injected with such an amount of drugs that she has died; but who gives a real shit, because she was sullied goods anyhow. The virgin–or aka, Neeson’s daughter–is pure, however, and she ends up in an auction, drugged out of her mind, and being sold for half a million dollars to a fat Arabian man in a purple jumpsuit. It’s kind of hard to escape the judgement that is being made on young women within the background of the film, especially given that the entire premise of the film supports the idea that your children need to be watched, because when you’re not there, Albanians will break in and use them in a prostitution ring that is connected to the French secret service. That last bit in the film is never really explored, I might add.

But still, the subtext, it’s very conservative, very Christian, and really uncool.

But hey, at least it doesn’t star Denzel Washington.

That’s a little something, isn’t it?