In preparation for those Vancouver lectures, I’ve been reading lots and lots of different takes on Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, “The medium is the message.” (I think he’s wrong, by the way, but you’ll have to listen to the lectures in November to find out why.) From critiques of McLuhan, I took a rabbit trail into the early days of print and the effect this had on the reading process. And while I was reflecting on how the book changes words, I came across this.
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I wanted to pass on this email from a reader…both because I enjoyed it and because it demonstrates just how books get sold. (Not primarily through ads in the New York Times, in short.)
Dear Susan,
I live in Australia – which is probably the antipodes to Charles City, VA. Three hours ago I hade never heard of Susan Wise Bauer, nor had I any intention to buy a book on medieval history, and yet here I am, three hours later, having ordered “The History of the Medieval World”, and very likely to order some of your other works as well.
I thought you might be amused to discover the chain of chance circumstance that led to the sale of one of your history books in a very crowded marketplace – especially a sale to a buyer on the other side of the Earth. This event might even qualify as a manifestation of the famous theory of the “Six Degrees of Separation”, or at least something like that…
Anyway, you can thank an author by the name of James Wood for your sale. This is the same James Wood who is described as “…the author of 14 best-selling books of fiction and non-fiction…former CEO of United Press International and managing editor of the Sunday Times (London)…etc”. It is also the same James Wood who you tore into in a critical review of one of his books last year on Amazon.com, which has probably meant that you won’t be invited to a BBQ at James Wood’s place any time soon…
A couple of weeks ago I purchased a CD of an MP3 audio version of Wood’s book “How Fiction Works” from Blackstone Audio (USA). My decision was made solely on the basis of Wood’s credentials, and, because essentially I just wanted to find out from an informed source…well….“how fiction works”!! After all, why wouldn’t I buy this book when Publishers Weekly declared that :
“Arguably the pre-eminent critic of contemporary English letters, [Wood] accomplishes his mission of asking a critic’s questions and offer[s] a writer’s answers with panache. This book is destined to be marked up, dog-eared and cherished.”
The audiobook had to be shipped all the way across the Pacific at extra expense to me, because Amazon-Audible won’t sell MP3 downloads into the Australian market for recently published books (yours included). This is due to quaint 19th century geographic distribution restrictions in the publishing industry – but they are quite happy to sell a physical version of the same thing!!
Wood’s book turned out to be a complete waste of my time and money – so much for Publishers Weekly’s beat-up. I was so infuriated that I decided to have a belated look at what the reviewers on Amazon had to say – and that is where I found you. I can see that you are a no-bull lady who calls a spade a spade, and I wish I had read your review first. I have said as much in my own just-added customer comment to your review, which you will find on Amazon.
Clearly this reader has excellent literary judgment. But I digress.
The forthrightness of your review left me a little intrigued, so I followed the trail to your website and when I read your quote from Barbara Tuchman, I realised that, in you, I had stumbled across what seems to be a rare species – an historian with integrity and a great writing style. As Clint (Eastwood) would say, this has just made my day! For many years Australia has been beset by “history wars”, where some of the local academic & political class have been only too happy to bend historical fact to support their pet ideologies, and that has got right up the noses of a lot of people !
Having discovered that you write history books, I then had a look at what you had up on Amazon. After reading the first page of “The History of the Medieval World” (about the Constantinian shift), I knew that this was one author whose books I just gotta have…
Sooo, if you have ever copped any flak from the James Woods of this world about your no-nonsense book reviews, then just remember that you are probably triggering a widening circle of book sales out of them…
Best regards…
That made my day. Thanks, Australian Reader!
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This was a big week for life events: we delivered Christopher to his freshman year at college, and Ben turned seventeen.
The college trip came first…after a last goodbye from the youngest.
(Wait, one last visit from the brain-sucker…)
Arriving…
Picking up dorm keys…
And moving in.
Right after I took that picture, Pete and I realized that two perfectly healthy young men, aged eighteen and nineteen, were completely capable of unpacking and organizing all their own stuff. So we left and went out for a great lunch and a movie. Just the two of us. All alone.
And then back home to give Ben his much-anticipated birthday present.
“Wait, I know I can get this thing louder…”
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Tuesday night, Dan (thirteen) came charging upstairs after his nightly visit out to the chickenhouse to gather the eggs. “There was a huge snake wrapped around one of the chickens,” he announced, “but I whacked it with a shovel until it let go.” (And then he said, “The snake freaked me out so I need to play some computer games before bed to calm down.” But that was another conversation.)
We have the chickens fenced off from foxes, eagles, and stray dogs, but it’s impossible to keep snakes out of the nesting boxes. Black snakes slither up in there and eat the eggs. When I was a kid, we had what seemed like HUNDREDS of chickens, and it was our job to feed, water, collect eggs, clean and grade eggs, and sell eggs. If you weren’t careful about sticking your hands into nesting boxes, you’d find yourself patting a snake. In fact, one of the enduring memories of my childhood is putting my hand under a sitting hen to check for eggs and discovering that she was SITTING on a blacksnake which was busy swallowing the eggs in the nest while she was laying more.
Chickens are not so smart.
I never saw a snake do anything to a chicken, though, so this snake clearly has delusions of boa-constrictor grandeur. Apparently the chicken in question survived the shovel-whacking and staggered off to recover, so the squeezing was ineffective anyway.
Last night Dan came thundering back upstairs again (these snake emergencies always happen after Pete and I are in bed, I’m not sure why) and announced that Ben (nearly seventeen) had caught the snake. Turns out Dan had been tracking the snake’s habits and figuring out when it visited the egg buffet every night, and last night he dragged Ben out to help him catch it. “And he’s got it downstairs!” he finishes up. “It’s HUGE! Come see it!”
(shudder)
It was a really big snake. A six-footer.
This morning at breakfast, I say to Ben, “Where did you free the snake?” (Black snakes drive out copperheads and eat rats, so we never kill them; we just keep moving them out of the henhouse.)
“Oh,” Ben says, “it was dark and the snake was kind of hard to hold, so I just let him go down near your office.”
(shudder) (shudder)
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Still immersed in piles of “social media will bring an end to civilization” books in preparation for those Vancouver lectures. Still unconvinced, although I’m accumulating a list of objections to social media that seem serious and valid and thus deserve a response.
(None of these, by the way, from Andrew Keen’s abysmal The Cult of the Amateur. Keen argues that, unless professionals and experts remain in the gatekeeping positions of publishing, music, and news companies, we’ll be flooded by unmediated dreck. His book just proves that dreck can make it past the gatekeepers–at least the ones at Crown.)
Today I ran across this social networking map from Flowtown. Click on the link and visit the original; absolutely brilliant. As those of you who’ve seen the History of the Ancient World or the History of the Medieval World know, I love maps.
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Interesting news from the New York Times…
In what might be the latest sign of trouble for brick-and-mortar bookstores, the mega-chain Barnes & Noble announced on Tuesday that its board was putting the company up for sale.
The news surprised analysts and alarmed publishers, who have watched as the book business has increasingly shifted to online retailers and e-book sales, leaving both chains and independent sellers struggling….
For years, Barnes & Noble has been battered by large shifts in the publishing industry and the retail environment. Book sales have moved toward big-box stores like Costco, Wal-Mart and Target, and away from mall-based stores like B. Dalton, which Barnes & Noble acquired in the late 1980s….
One analyst said that consumers had been moving away from physical bookstores in favor of buying books online or at other retail outlets. “They might pick up a book when they’re buying hand sanitizer or Band-Aids, rather than actually seeking out a bookstore as a destination and then buying a book at that point,” said Michael Norris, senior analyst at Simba Information, which provides research and advice to publishers. “A lot of independents are figuring it out one bookstore at a time, and that’s what the Barnes & Nobles of the world have to do.”
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