Authors now have more Amazon sales ranking data to obsess over. Weekly Nielsen BookScan data is now available to authors for free through their “Author Central” area. (press release)
More Amazon Sales Ranking Crack
“As a boy”
In 2002, David Friedman thought of a question he wanted to ask Oliver Sacks, on the topic of 3D glasses and “pseudoscopic” vision. A week after he sent the letter, he received a typewritten reply, complete with diagrams. At The Morning News, a copy of the letter he received, along with background.
The Family
Recommended Reading (National Prayer Breakfast edition): Jeff Sharlet's terrifying, timely The Family.
Sanity Is a Construct
Recommended Perusing: This list from Electric Literature of six contemporary innovators of the short story. From Lorrie Moore to Alejandro Zambra, it is some seriously good company.
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Let’s Have a Panel About It
Man Booker Prize-winner Marlon James is finished talking about diversity, and here's part of his logic: "A panel on diversity is like a panel on world peace. It should be seeking a time when we no longer need such panels. It should be a panel actively working towards its own irrelevance. The fact that we’re still having them not only means that we continue to fail, but the false sense of accomplishment in simply having one is deceiving us into thinking that something was tried."
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Alice Walker on Screen
Still deciding what to do this Friday night? Watch PBS's new documentary on Alice Walker, Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, at 9 p.m. EST. At The Daily Beast, Agunda Okeyo discusses the history of the film's production, which took six years. "Stories about women of color told by women of color are sidelined and neglected in favor of our stories being told by white women and men," director Pratibha Parmar says.
Digital Nation
Point: "Repeated surveys show that children spend less time reading than did previous generations. They instead devote many hours of their waking lives to electronic screens of one kind or another." Counterpoint: "Generation Y, those born between 1979 and 1989, spent the most money on books in 2011, taking over long-held book-buying leadership from baby boomers...with 43 percent of GenY's purchases going to online channels, they are adding momentum to the industry shift to digital." Conclusion?
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