“Always practice basic online etiquette, or ‘netiquette.’ Consider including emoticons to help add personality to your message and set the right tone. Also, be sure to stay on topic in a conversation and avoid writing in all caps, which is the online equivalent to shouting.” The Amazon Author Insights blog (full disclosure: Amazon helps us keep the lights on around here!) has a list of guidelines for authors looking to engage with their fans (and critics) on Goodreads. More recommended reading: our own Emily St. John Mandel on how to respond to your critics.
Do Not Shout
O. Brisky’s Book Sale
A friend of the late O.J. Brisky – longtime proprietor of Micanopy, Florida’s O. Brisky Books – is in the process of selling 100,000 of the man’s books, many of them rare.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Fassnacht; Gottlieb; Egan; Kleeman; Goolrick; Gaiman
Out this week: A Good Family by Erik Fassnacht; Best Boy by Eli Gottlieb; A Window Opens by Elisabeth Egan; You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman; The Fall of Princes by Robert Goolrick; and a limited edition of Neil Gaiman’s The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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Take Your Vitamins
Did Gollum have a vitamin D deficiency? In the Medical Journal of Australia, Joseph A. Hopkinson and Nicholas S. Hopkinson posit that the Lord of the Rings saga could’ve been prevented had the inhabitants of Middle Earth just gotten a little more sunlight. “Systematic textual analysis of The Hobbit supports our initial hypothesis that the triumph of good over evil may be assisted to some extent by the poor diet and lack of sunlight experienced by the evil characters.”
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That Title Alone Deserves A Groan
A decade in the making, Val Kilmer’s one-man play about Mark Twain, Citizen Twain, will finally open this weekend. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the actor (at a cemetery?) to talk about “his career and the landscape of America.”
Why Can’t We Be Friends?
So does literature really have the power to bring liberals and conservatives together? Probably not. Either way, this is still a fascinating study: “The ‘most startling result was this: it was conservative — not liberal — readers who are most active in producing this space of cultural compromise.’ Basically, within this sample size, conservative readers tended to exude more generous praise for ‘bridge books’ and did so with a vernacular considered to be ‘less heated or emotional.’ Grammatically, they also expressed ‘more complex thoughts.'”
A resolution
On the relative statuses of literary, mainstream, and genre fiction: a resolution. (From Stephanie Anderson, manager of WORD in Brooklyn.)
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On designing a Frankenbook
App designer and lit lover Dave Morris blogs about making an interactive app for retelling Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the differences between video games and interactive reading.