Archives: September 2004

My name is Nathalie.
This is my blog.
Buy it me.

Please.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

False encouragement, like fiction, relies on lying convincingly. And MFA students, if they’re decent and ambitous, try to learn the art of both — while hoping, privately, that their hammy classmates submit work to Fiction Bitch, fiction’s online dominatrix.

The Fiction Bitch doesn’t want to encourage new writers. She wants to weed out terrible writers before they go on to bore millions of innocent publishing house interns to tears. If you suspect you are a lousy writer, the Fiction Bitch can remove all doubts, thus freeing you for other, more productive pursuits.

Masochists, or sadist classmates: submit stories here.

Related Reading:
Learning to Translate Workshop-Speak

While reading is still considered a relatively private and intellectual endeavor, national book clubs seem to drive up sales by ensuring books’ social currency. Reading no longer needs to be the artsy equivalent of solitary confinement; instead, it can be a ticket to a group event, as well as an affordable emulation of a beloved celebrity’s habits. Consequently, if you think literary culture is suffering for lack of readers, you probably see some good in TV shows’ book clubs; and if you think literary culture is suffering because people no longer like to think — at least, for themselves, that is — book clubs may seem like its death knell (and here comes the grim Ripa).

Unsurprisingly, the success of TV books clubs in the U.S. has vaulted the trend across the pond: earlier this year, Richard & Judy, Britain’s most popular morning talk show hosts (think a younger Regis, and a mumsy Ripa), introduced the R & J book club and bumped sales of its selected books up by, in one case, 871%.

Originally inspired by “the Oprah effect,” the R & J book club is now moving in Oprah’s opposite direction. According to Book2Book, a UK book site, the British duo has launched a first novel competition, with the winner set to recieve a publishing deal from Pan Macmillan and a £50,000 advance.

In other words: the book clubs of the future might not just read books, but write and market them.

(Here’s daring anyone to submit to J & R‘s competition a slightly altered and double-spaced copy of Twenty-Seventh City…)