Compulsive Reader Talks Top 5 Shows Of All Time

My radio show, The Compulsive Reader Talks is nearing it's fifth year.  In Internet terms, that's a long time and a lot of shows, all dedicated to authors, books, and the changing world of publishing.   As we inch towards the end of 2011, I thought it might be interesting to have a little look back, and see which shows have been most popular.  So, in order of popularity, I'm listing the top five shows of all time, which you might like to listen to once more or catch up on if you missed them first time round.  Note that all of the shows are also available on iTunes and you can download them and listen to them in the car or while you're cooking, etc.  I think you'll find much here that's enlightening and interesting.  I know that I've certainly enjoyed the significant privilege of being able to talk to such inspirational people and am very excited about the line up for 2012.

 1.  Interview with Craig Silvey
Craig Silvey's novel Jasper Jones won a swag of awards and changed the writing game for this young novelist and musician.  With film rights in hand, the book is set to continue its well-deserved popularity.  Silvey dropped by shortly after the book was published to talk to us about Jasper Jones in a show that remains the most popular that I've ever aired.

2.  Interview with Helen Townsend
Helen Townsend has had over 17 books published, and dropped by the show to talk to me about her book Above the Starry Frame, a historical novel that followed the life of William Irwin, an Irish farm boy who migrated to Australia at 18 in 1849, leaving behind the Irish potato famine.

3.  Interview with Sir Ken Robinson
Ken Robinson has become an international celebrity for, among other things, his amazing TED Talks, and his life changing, educationally focused book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.  From my point of view, what I liked best about Ken Robinson, was how down to earth and just plain nice he was when we chatted, shortly after The Element was released.

4.  Interview with Howard Waldman
Howard Waldman's literary works busts all genres, bringing sci fi, fantasy, mystery and historical fiction into a seamless literary experience.  In this interview he talks to me about his book Good Americans Go to Paris When They Die. 

 5.  Interview with Mark Coker
I don't think it would be a stretch to credit at least some of the impact and growth of ebooks to Smashwords' Mark Coker. From a one man show with a single book to 80,000+ books, Smashwords opened the floodgates for self-publishing, changing the way books are published and sold. Many others have since followed, but perhaps none to the same extent.  Mark dropped by the show to talk about his site in the relatively early days, and to make some predictions which nearly all played out.

Holiday thank you

As the end of 2011 fast approaches (too fast perhaps), I'd like to just take a moment to thank you, my dear readers, for all your wonderful support this year.  Not only for stopping by to read and comment on each blog post, but for linking virtual hands in a worldwide community of those who love to read and talk about books.

I've got a couple of end of year gifts for you.  The first is from my writing group Writers on the Move, who have provided a Holiday Season 2011 eBook from the members.  This book is full of writing and marketing tips, and can be picked up here. 

The second is a full copy of my poetry book Quark Soup, which can be grabbed here.

Finally, I'd like you to have a copy of my award winning short story The Fall. 

Enjoy and have a healthy, safe, happy holiday season all the best for a terrific new year. 

Top 2011 book list roundup

I'm not going to do a list of my top 2011 books.  I've already dispensed with the notion of stars and because I like so many books, some of which I've read this year but which didn't come out this year (one book I read this year came out in 1953), and for different reasons and different moods, that I just don't feel comfortable pinpointing just some of them.  It's all too much of a reduction for me.  But what I will do as a kind of year end roundup, is to point you in the direction of some of the more interesting, well done 'best 2011 book lists' that others have made.

• Salon's fiction list is quite a nice one, followed neatly by their writer's favourites list where 50 well-known writers including Jeffrey Eugenides, Ann Patchett, Stephen Pinker and Ali Smith choose their favourite books of 2011.  
• Publisher's Weekly has a top 10 slide show that includes review links.
• The Guardian UK does something similar to Salon, and asks well-known authors like John Banville, Julian Barnes and Margaret Drabble to provide their lists.  Readers area asked to also contribute to the discussion.
• The editors at Slate pick their tops, with quite an eclectic selection. 
• The NY Times has 5 top fiction and 5 top nonfiction on their list.  
• Kirkus Books focuses solely on fiction and provides review links to each book they've chosen.
• Library Journal Review's top 10 has an interesting range of fiction and nonfiction
• Goodreads choice award for 2011 has a range of popular and literary titles, all good.
• The Telegraph UK's Keith Miller picks his besties for 2011 and I agree with nearly all of them (though I'm still struggling with The Pale King, which has some of the most beautiful writing I've ever come across but which is so painfully inchoate at times that I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get through it (and I like to think of myself as reasonably tough).
• I haven't read a single book on the Esquire list and as you might expect, there's a kind of blokey slant to them at least judging from the descriptions, but I'm including it here for balance.
• The Atlantic has ten enticing books that the others missed including one delightfully described as being "rich as loam".
• Readings author picks has just a slight Australian slant, and includes some great books that other lists have missed (including the one I've picked as my #1 this year).

Finally I will just end by saying that the one book which made my heart race the most this year, which actually made me stop reading for a moment to catch my breath, was China Mieville's Embassytown.  It's not an easy book - certainly not one for reading when you're half-asleep or looking for a little light entertainment.  I've given my own copy out to about six people who wanted it after hearing me gush, and only one of them actually ended up reading the whole book.  But oh, the things Mieville does with language in that book.  It's extraordinary. 
Happy reading everyone!

Blackout: the visual rendition

We've had a few storms here lately, where the power came on and off, which encouraged me (once the power was back on), to finally give Prezi a try and have a play with a poem that was indeed, as the title suggests, inspired by a lengthy blackout.  This is the result: a visual rendering of the final poem in my book Repulsion Thrust (available for less than $10 at Amazon I might add by way of a holiday gift giving prompt).  Our utter dependence on power is a notion that I'm continually reminded of every time a piece of technology (and like most people I'm surrounded by it and base my daily activities on the use of it, including what I'm doing right now) doesn't work.  Of course I do have candles in the larder, and playing boardgames by candlelight is actually a very relaxing and soothing thing to do, once the panic and sense of isolation wears off.  Nevertheless...

Literary Trends on Both Sides of the Pond

Guest blog by Isabella Woods

With Christmas fast approaching and consumers feeling the pinch of recent budget cuts, the battle is on the High St to entice Christmas shoppers inside their tinsle laden interiors to spend their precious pennies.

In the last decade, technology has dramatically affected the way that consumers read. With updated versions of e-readers and i-pad’s hitting the shelves over the next few weeks, where does that leave the likes of WHSmith’s and Waterstones when it comes to buying literature?

Slaughter of the innocents

 More than 800 bookshops have shut in the past five years, including almost 400 independent outlets, according to new figures from the Booksellers Association of UK and Ireland. Major book retailers are being forced to cut their prices and it’s not an uncommon site to see ‘buy one get one free’ deals on immaculate hardcovers to encourage that all important Christmas consumer, full of mulled wine and on his way to compare broadband deals at the pub.

In our modern world, there has been an increased interest for e-readers such as Amazon.com's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook and Sony's Reader. Rather than trying to wedge our dog-eared paperbacks into our bags, we are now convenienced with downloadble novels in their hundreds within the slimline gadgets.

Sales of e-books increased by 318% in 2010 and many predict that at least 50% of all books sold within 10 years will be digital downloads. Does it really share the same sentiment to receive a gift certificate for Amazon in order to download your fiction, or is it really better to receive an old-fashioned book?

There seems to be a similar electronic landslide in the US, where Net e-book sales in January were reported to have accumulated $69.9 million in revenue for their publishers, which amounts to a 116 percent jump from last year's total for the month. During the same period, adult hardcovers were down 11.3 percent to $49.1 million and paperbacks faced a similar reduction in demand and fell to $83.6 million, a steep drop of 19.7 percent year-on-year.

However, back in the UK, there seems to be an unlikely profiteer in the form of the supermarket. Publishers and Literary agents are more likely to keep a keen eye on what’s making Tesco’s Top 10 fiction, as sales at supermarkets and “mixed multiples”, such as high street shops like Mothercare, rose by 7% in 2010, an increase of around £14.9m in value terms.

Retailer Analyst, Kate Clavert, said: “I think there is a general trend of supermarkets taking an increasing share of the non-food spend. They can also pitch their pricing lower than the high street, which is something they can do economically. Amazon.com is now selling more e-books than paperback books, so their business has shifted too."

Public libraries - now available in pocket size

Since the spending cuts have been introduced, libraries are facing a bleak future. Are they an easy target for government cuts or are we as a society not using the services of this institution as we once did? I regularly visit the library with my young children, but other than children, students and the elderly, are the books really being borrowed as much as they once were? The libraries are pulling out all the stops to bring back local support it seems, with more in-house events such as film clubs, book clubs and craft fairs being held. There has also been an increase of computers for internet use installed within the library itself. It does seem ironic while a few people scour the shelves for a book to read, a queue is forming for people to log on to the available computers in order to check their e-mail accounts.

According to Public Libraries News, “More than 360 libraries and nearly 30 mobile services in England are under threat of closure this year as councils respond to the recession and government funding cuts.”

I hope that the libraries stay open. I take full advantage of borrowing books that would ordinarily cost me £10 from a book shop. I haven’t yet dipped my toe into the future of e-reading, I am hoping that the likes of Waterstone’s shop windows continue to burst with eye-catching books to entice me inside. But, on a recent train journey, I couldn’t help but notice a plethora of commuters sat tapping on their Smartphones or engrossed in their Kindles, a random few with a paperback or newspaper. Will the book become obsolete, down the same path as vinyl or VHS, is the future really Kindle?

Isabella Woods is a professional writer for numerous websites and publications.

Books I'm grateful for

There's so much to be thankful for this year.  I've got my own novel Black Cow coming out in the new year, I've got a new novel in the works, and poetry flowing from the fingertips (and a very interesting proposal on something that I can't yet talk about but is exciting me).  But it's as a reader that I'm most grateful.  I'm grateful for my stack of 'to be read' books.  Yes, it's growing, and yes I have more books than time to read (or review) them, but in the overall scheme of things, I'm pretty happy to be in this situation.  I'm thankful for Julian Barnes' The Sense of An Ending, sitting patiently, in all its slim, elegant hardbackness, on my bedside table.  I'm also grateful for Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery, with its striking red and gilt wolf cover, promising the most erudite of terror.  Then there's my half finished Catch-22 (I'll be back soon Joseph), Richard Dawkins' and Dave McKean's The Magic of Reality, beautiful enough to have on the coffee table (though I don't actually have a coffee table), the lovely Buddhistic poetry book Mountains Belong to the People Who Love Them, which is almost finished (and it's been doing me so much good that I've nearly forgotten to blog), and many many more delicious books, all plump and juicy and beckoning to me from their steamy covers.

If I don't show up at your Thanksgiving dinner, it isn't because I'm not grateful for your invitation.  I'm not averse to turkey with cranberry sauce, or a lovely natter over a glass of vino.  It's just that there are so many good books out right now, that all I really wanna do, is sit like a statue (let's say, like Buddha) on my plump sofa and read all weekend long.  Happy Thanksgiving, and may all your stacks be enticing.

Book Blogging BooBoos: A Baker’s Dozen

Guest Blog by Carolyn Howard-Johnson

I often coach authors with their blogging projects. They know it’s important enough to the health of their books to hire me, but they haven’t explored their blog’s features and they tend to go blog-happy and forget that a blog intended to market their books must stay focused on, well, books. At the very least. Actually the focus should be a little narrower than that. It should follow a track aligned with the genre the author writes in or even the specific book he or she has written.

Here are some basic rules for an author’s blog if the blog is to do more than serve as a fun hobby.

1. Map out a campaign for your blog. Reread your book. What are the themes? What do the characters do for a living? What genre is it. Make notes. I mean it. You should be able to make a list of ten or twelve essential aspects of your book. Now decide which of them you want to cover in your blog and name it according. Often your name or the name of your book will work.

2. Type “labels” or keywords into that little window-like form located under your blog post window. They help people—you know, people like READERS—find your blog.

3. Don’t spend a lot of money getting someone to design your blog page. Sure it should look good, but the free templates will work just fine. People come to hear what you have to say.

4. Don’t bury your blog on the most obscure service you can find. It should be on one that Google’s spiders visit and record. That’s one reason I like blogspot.com or blogger.com. It’s owned by Google and blog posts get noticed practically immediately.

5. Like just about anything else in your book’s marketing campaign, exposure is important. Use Real Simple Syndication (RSS Feeds) to send notifications to Twitter, your Facebook page, even your Web site.

6. Don’t choose a blog service that tells you in its terms of service that in will censure and censor what you write. (Wordpress is one of those.) What if you write chicklit? Or streetwise crime? Or just like to rant? And trust me, blog visitors tend to love a good rant!

7. You know that voice you developed when you wrote your book. Don’t lose it! You blog isn’t a high school essay.

8. One of my writing pals (Peter Bowerman) ends almost every one of his blogs with a question. It’s a good habit to get into..

9. Read. Ideas come from reading everything from The New Yorker to Time magazine to other people’s blogs. (But do check the chapter on plagiarism in the new edition of my Frugal Book Promoter (http://budurl.com/FrugalBkPromo) . It will help you navigate things like quotes and the borrowing of ideas.

10. Promote your blog by leaving comments on others’ blogs—especially if they relate to yours. But do add something to the conversation rather than using a cut-and-paste comment that obviously shows no interest in the blogger or her post.

11. Add images, widgets, or ads when you can. Some blog services help you by automating gadgets that will help with this.

12. Use a service like Google’s Analytics that helps you assess where your readers are coming from and which of your blogs attract the most readers.

13. Occasionally mention some of the other things you do on the Web, like your Web site, your Facebook Like page, and your Twitter stream.

If you are a fiction writer, read the white paper Phyllis Zimbler Miller and I wrote on blogging for fiction writers (www.fictionmarketing.com). And the chapters on blogging in The Frugal Book Promoter. Honestly, do these things and you may not need to pay me or people like me the big bucks (Ahem!) to make your blog effective.

Effective involves others—writers, readers, and other bloggers. Effective blogging connects with your other online entities. You can have fun with it. You should have fun with it. But blogging effectively adds to the joy. Think of how much more fun it will be when you look at those stats and see that your blogging efforts are in fact a viable way to market your book.

 Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of Your Blog, Your Business (www.budurl.com/Blogging4Retailers), and a new edition of the multi award-winning The Frugal Book Promoter (www.budurl.com/FrugalBkProm) which has been Expanded! Updated! And is now a USA Book News winner in its own right! It’s also now available for Kindle at http://budurl.com/FrugalBkProKindle.