Interested in writing a bestseller? You may want to check out Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers‘ newest book, The Bestseller Code. Or maybe not: “At times, it seems like Archer and Jockers are trying to retrofit a closed system. They found that best-sellers have lots of contractions—the better, they explain, to mimic contemporary speech—and exclamation points only rarely … They conclude that best-sellers consist of ‘shorter, cleaner sentences, without unneeded words,’ and that best-selling characters ‘make things happen.’ Active verbs predict best-sellers better than passive verbs. ‘Hesitation doesn’t keep pages turning,’ Archer and Jockers decide. After all that work, in other words, the algorithm ends up confirming the uncontested tenets of craft and style.”
Tell Us Something We Don’t Know
The Pioneer Detectives on NOOK
Good news NOOK readers: The Pioneer Detectives is now available on the NOOK.
August Open Letters
The August issue of Open Letters is available. Nestled amidst the literary fare are early Oscar nominations from Sarah Hudson and a piece on the video game The Sims by Phillip A. Lobo.
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Salinger Snaffu
If J.D. Salinger had it his way, we would all probably be dead by the time we got to read his unpublished works. However, someone leaked scans of a paperback entitled Three Stories, including the Catcher in the Rye precursor, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” on eBay on Wednesday. You can view the PDF here.
E-Books Rise Up
Are e-books more than just a publishing platform? Could they be “a whole new literary form“?
Tuesday New Release Day: Strout, Lytal
A pair of books featured in our Great 2013 Book Preview hit shelves today: Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout’s fourth novel, The Burgess Boys, as well as Benjamin Lytal’s A Map of Tulsa.
Tradecraft, maybe. Style, not so much. Art, not at all.