Buzz Worthy News 17th September 2012

17 September, 2012 Buzz Worthy News 35 comments

Buzz Wor­thy News

Wel­come to this week’s Buzz Wor­thy News! Where adults are reading Young Adult, we can’t say vagina, trolling: book shop level and Harper Collins throws down the gauntlet and challenges you to send them your unagented submissions.  All this and much, much more.  Read on to find out every­thing that’s been hap­pen­ing in the book world this week.

Buzz Wor­thy News is Cuddlebuggery’s weekly Mon­day news post.  Bring­ing you all the most inter­est­ing, rel­e­vant and fun news from the pub­lish­ing and book blog­ging world.

Buzz Worthy News 17th September 2012

Image by Joy F

Who is really reading Young Adult?

This article was really no surprise to a Young Adult book blog who caters to an adult audience, but apparently adults are reading Young Adult book, y’all!  Like… all the time!

Alright, having the statistics is actually pretty interesting, I admit.  Anyway.  So, like 55% of YA is bought by adults – mostly between 30-44 years of age.  And not necessarily bought for sons, daughters, nieces and nephews either!  78% were like, “Nah-uh!  This book is for ME!”

Some more information from the Infograph:

  • Early adopters: More than 40% read e-books, equivalent to the highest adoption rates of adult genres of mystery and romance
  • Committed: 71% say that if an e-book of their desired title was unavailable, they would buy the print book instead
  • Loyal: Enjoying the author’s previous books has a moderate or major influence over the book choice for more than two-thirds of the respondents
  • Socially active: Although more than half of respondents reported having “no interest” in participating in a reading group, these readers are very active in social networks and often get recommendations from friends. –Publisher’s Weekly

So what does that mean intrepid reader of Cuddlebuggery?  It means the book industry just realized that you exist.  And they want your SOUL!  Ha! Kidding.  Just your monies.

SOURCE

Image by *DejiNyucu

Sockpuppetry – Occasionally Hilarious, But Still Wrong

So, a self-published author did something…inadvisable.  He left, without permission, paraphernalia for his book in a Waterstones book store, instructing people to buy his book from Amazon.  For those who don’t see the problem – that’s like leaving leaflets in an Evangelical church advertizing Mormonism.

Anyhow, predictably, the pamphlets were quickly removed and the author was emailed and kindly asked not to do it again.  However, when checking the reviews of his book, he noticed new and decidedly negative reviews had appeared.  Long story short, it turns out that it was an employee or two from Waterstones.  He complained, they were removed.  More turned up, he complained, they were removed.  More turned up, he complained, they were removed.

Waterstones ended up adding his ebook to their catalogue as part of a peace offering, but refused to advertise his book – making the author sad.

So, here’s the lesson.  Don’t be a douche and spam book stores with pamphlets encouraging their customers to use a competitor AND don’t make sockpuppets to trash a book you haven’t read.  There.  Everyone wins.

SOURCE

Haha HarperVoyager!  Have fun with that…

So HarperVoyager, HarperCollins’ fantasy and scifi imprint, is doing something really awesome.  For two weeks, 1st-14th of October, they’re taking any and all full unagented manuscripts – therefor challenging every wannabe author out there to rush to finish what they’ve got in time for closing date.

10-12 lucky authors will be selected to be published with HarperVoyager – which most people have generally recognized as the amazing opportunity it is.

Voyager is going where no gatekeeper has gone before, maybe, I think.

Despite HarperCollins’s declared policy of refusing unsolicited manuscripts, Voyager already receives 50-100 unagented submissions a week. In anticipation of a huge increase, editors from the UK, US and Australia are lined up to help out with the extra reading.

“I think there’s going to be an absolute deluge,” said editor Amy McCulloch. “But we are seeing all the time the new and exciting ways of discovering new talent, and we feel it is the right time.”-Guardian.co.uk

How many will be manuscripts submitted five minutes after the author has written the first draft?  A million?  A million, million?

SOURCE

We can’t say vagina, yo

So Naomi Wolf wrote this book about how stupid it is that western culture, among others, is so weird about the vagina and how that kind of happened out of nowhere for no good reason.  Awesome.  I want to read this book because it sounds badass.

But clearly nobody at Apple read that.  Because if you search for Wolf’s book in the Apple ebook store, it will appear as V****a.

Hahaha!  Must be Apple being ironic or some kind of bug, right?

Amazon and Waterstones’ online stores both allow the word to be seen in full. And unfortunately for Apple, a picture of Wolf’s book jacket clearly displays the title on iTunes just centimetres to the left of the starred-out version.

Wolf herself was startled to hear about the censorship. “You won’t believe it – I gather Apple is censoring Vagina: A New Biography on iTunes though expletives get through – think different?” she wrote on her Facebook page.-Guardian.co.uk

This is a word that my four year old son says.  Because, you know, he has to remind me five times a day that I have one as opposed to a penis (which he proudly tells me he has).  Just like how something like 51% of the world’s population has one.

Way to fail, Apple.  Way to fail.

SOURCE

NOOOOOOOOooooooooo – Repeat this for 50 minutes

So the latest Avengers vs X-Men installment is out and something really big happens.  A really big character bites the dust, buys a farm, kicks the bucket, and all that jazz.

It’s horrible.  Heartbreaking.  Why?  What were they thinking?  How dare they?  But apparently it’s awesome.

“I don’t always write in a very Shakespearean way but as I was putting the final touches on the scene and then when I saw the pencils I was quite surprised how large the tragedy truly felt,” he told Marvel. “Not only does Cyclops, who is arguably not in control of his own actions, murder (redacted), for lack of a better word, but he does it in front of every major player in the Marvel Universe. This isn’t some rumour that’s been spread around. Everyone saw him do it. Scott knows what he has done.”

Well, I’m not too cut up about this character dying because, ya know, characters die and come back all the time.  Even Magneto’s died like seven times.  Pretty spry for a dead guy.

And all the 90’s kids say, “Hey yo!”

Still, here to freak us all out:

Marvel executive editor Tom Brevoort, however, told the New York Daily News that Xavier’s was “about as serious and lasting a death as you’re apt to get in one of these”.-Guardian.co.uk

Brave words, Brevoort.  Let’s see if they stand the test of time!

SOURCE

Somebody attacked Pam and now they must be punished

So, in case you’re hiding in some remote corner of the world and haven’t heard yet:

Some douche-canoe tracked down the lovely Pam Van Hylckama outside her daughter’s school and attacked both her and her car.  Pam’s cutsey dog bit the assailant and defended her, thereby ensuring in that single moment that it never appears on dog-shaming.com.  For a full rundown of the tweets see here.

Police asked to see her emails, tracked down one of the senders of hate mail and found him with alleged marks from her dog on him.  However, Pam stresses that this person may still be innocent and hasn’t been proven guilty yet.  However, he is guilty of sending hatemail to an agent due to rejection which is still not cool.

Harry J Connolly wrote a blog post on this encouraging authors that can’t deal with agent rejection to just self-publish instead.  A marvelous idea until said author then goes berserk at reviewers and attacks them instead.  But the rest of the post is good.

When I spoke to Pam, she stressed the importance of cyber security.  Pam used foursquare to check herself into locations – making it exponentially easier to track her down.  For assistance in protecting yourself from both cyberbullying or crossover online to real life harassment, check out our Blogging Anonymously 1, 2, and 3 posts.

SOURCE

 

Announcement!

Sad news today.  For awhile Cuddlebuggery is going back to just Steph and Kat.  Archer contributed so much and we love him to death.  He’ll still be a Cuddlebuggery reviewer though and Kat will be occasionally posting on his blog with gaming reviews and generally lowering his blogging standards.

 

 

35 Responses to “Buzz Worthy News 17th September 2012”

  1. Fangs4Fantasy

    He went in Waterstones and left pamphlets asking people to use amazon? Tacky tacky tacky. Glad to see it bit him on the arse. Some people need to learn some class
     
    Clearly Naomi Wolf should have called the book *quiet whisper* “Down There” and then blushed furiously and run off to hide. *eye roll*
     
     
    Damn, poor Pam that’s hell to face. And I’d say if an author is that unable to take rejection they shouldn’t be self-pubbing either, they need to work on their issues a bit before trying to deal with people

    • Stephanie Sinclair

       @Fangs4Fantasy “Clearly Naomi Wolf should have called the book *quiet whisper* “Down There” and then blushed furiously and run off to hide. *eye roll*”
       
      You win the internet! LOL. 

  2. parajunkee

    Now I’m on a mission to come up with a Vagina themed rap song that I can get Nikki Menaj — how do you spell that girl’s name? – to sing. Just to see if iTunes will censor it….
     
    Mission Accepted.

  3. cynicalsapphire

    Wait, you mean adults read YA? What? Who would do that? Clearly only mentally stunted people with no sense of good taste.
     
    Churches do things like that. I remember someone telling me about a mission trip they did where they targeted neighborhoods known to be Muslim. I wanted to punch ALL THE THINGS. Well, mostly just the person proudly telling me that story.
     
    *doesn’t have any finished novels* Darn. Don’t think I can make that deadline.
     
    Wow, Apple. Vagina is a swear word, then? Did anyone check to see if they do the same thing if Penis is in a title?
     
    OH MY GOD. SHE WAS PHYSICALLY ATTACKED?!?!?!

  4. KTGrant

    What’s worse, some people, or rather cowards under the alias of anonymous are saying Pam deserved it because she has a heavy presence online and she was probably mean to those wannbe writers who can’t handle rejection.
     
    I flipped out because yes, blame the victim yet again and not the screwed up psycho who attacked her. These are the same people who would blame the rape victim because she dressed too slutty and was asking for it.
     
    Sick. Really sick.

  5. Kara_M

    Not surprised so many in their thirties are reading YA. I’m thirty-two and I foresee myself reading YA for a long time to come. Reading YA helps me escape and feel young again. Why not?

  6. Yeti

    I loved Archer’s reviews, they never failed to crack me up, will be missed 🙁  though both Kat and Steph’s reviews make me chuckle too 🙂
     
    I’m nearly forty and read a ton of YA. I also got my father-in-law who’s sixty odd into it too and he loves it, always recommending stuff to me, and several of my friends love YA too.  Part of the appeal, to me at least, is that even when heavy topics are tackled YA doesn’t drag.

  7. Kate C.

    Awww… too bad about Archer.  I didn’t always agree with his opinions, but I’ll admit I enjoyed his posts!
     
    I’m right in that YA age group.  Of course, I’ve been reading YA & Juvenile for a LONG time, so I don’t know if I count as a true part of that market.  
     
    I’m of two minds about that Harper voyager thing.  Part of me wants to send in a book just to do it, but another part of me KNOWS I’m not going to change my mind about what I do, so why bother?  I know there will be a lot of submissions and there are a few authors who I hope submit.

    • KatKennedy

      @Kate C. I briefly considered sending it in – but… No. It’s not ready yet. *hugs manuscript*

  8. Holly

    Really … adults are buying YA titles for themselves?  What a shocker (said the woman who just bought Unspoken yesterday). 
     
    I can’t believe Apple is censoring “Vagina.”  I’ve always been under the impression that it’s “vulva” no one is allowed to say or write.  In fact, I completely expect this comment to disappear the second I hit Post on account of containing that word! 
     
    And I’m sorry to hear about Archer, too.  His reviews are always worth reading, and with books I liked but he didn’t, the stuff he calls out is usually stuff I missed, so he always gets me thinking. 

    • KatKennedy

      @Holly Vagina, vulva, labia – these are all technical terms. Not swear words. Now if you came on our blog saying vajajay it might be a different story – but not due to vulgarity!

  9. KD

    Apple censoring “vagina” doesn’t surprise me. The great lawmakers of Michigan (sarcasm) also censor this horrendously offensive word. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/14/lawmaker-banned-from-speaking-after-referring-to-her-vagina-in-abortion-debate.html

  10. Mary BookSwarm

    Aw, sad about Archer–though I still love you all! *hugs* 
     
    Did it really take this long for people to realize YA is bought/read by such a large percentage of adults? I mean, think about all of these blogs and in reality, how many are teens? I think I only follow two or three…

    • KatKennedy

      @Mary BookSwarm I think they’ve been getting a clue – but it’s nice to see some statistics. They should have asked us. The vast bulk of our readership is over 18.

  12. Georgette

    Wow, what a week! 
     
    First off, I can’t believe that author did that at Waterstone’s – but again, given the level of what we’ve seen with author behavior in general this year- I can. It saddens me. 
     
    Young adult- hell yeah, more adults read it than teens. I love it! It shows that a genre can appeal to any and all ages, and that is what the book buying business is(should be) about. (I know, I’m a bookseller).
     
    VAGINA. Will Apple try to censor your blog next? VAGINA. VAGINA. 
     
    Archer, man, it’s been stellar. But it isn’t goodbye, as you are still going to be here. It’s just going to be less. Happy travels regardless! 

  13. Sarah saz101

    I second Georgette: WHAT A WEEK! The WTFERY KNOWS NO BOUNDS.
    While it’s plenty entertaining, seriously. Whatthefuck O__O
    Maybe it’s an organised strike by morons everywhere? This was their week? Mmmmm? I’m… not sure where I’m going that. Need more coffee../
     
    Aw, Archer! We’ll miss you… except when we won’t… because…. you’ll still be reviewing. Just this just mean we won’t be seeing any guest posts and the like? ANYWAY. Good luck, Godspeed! Etc! *breaks champagne against your hull*
    …

    • KatKennedy

      @Sarah saz101 I don’t know what it was, but it sure was entertaining.

  14. Laura Lam

    Hi Kat!
     
    I’m glad they did a study to prove what a lot of us already knew re: YA. 
     
    Angry Robot/Strange Chemistry do an Open Door period for unagented subs every year (well, they’ve done it for two years…I was picked up the first year!) and Gollancz accept unagented subs as well, as does Ace/Roc and, last I checked, Jo Fletcher Books. They just keep it kinda quiet so they’re not overwhelmed with subs, I suppose!