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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Kat Kennedy
Latest posts by Kat Kennedy (see all)
- Buzz Worthy News: 20th May 2013 - May 20, 2013
- Review: The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey - May 17, 2013
- Cover Reveal + Giveaway: Kinslayer by Jay Kristoff - May 15, 2013
- Buzz Worthy News: 13th May 2013 - May 13, 2013
