Tea at Trianon: Going Straight to Paperback

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Going Straight to Paperback

What's a writer to do? To quote:

I felt that I was at a crossroads between a literary route, sanctioned by the review establishment and therefore desirable, and a commercial one, outside the purview of traditional booksellers, which might sell more copies but would change people's perception of my work.

So I began to do some research. In Europe, I found, paperback originals have been standard for years. In the 1960s, Beat writers in the United States were published only in paperback; I was surprised to learn that "Interpreter of Maladies," by Jhumpa Lahiri, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, was published only in paperback by Houghton Mifflin; "Cloud Atlas," by David Mitchell, was a Random House paperback original.

These books were the exception to the hardcover-first rule, but things are changing. Major national publications routinely feature paperback originals these days.

Book clubs, both online and in person, have become a large percentage of the reading public, and many of them won't consider reading books in hardcover. (Convincing people to shell out $25 for a hardcover book they've never heard of is very different from asking them to spend $12.) And they spread the word to an enormous engaged online community of readers via sites like Goodreads, She Reads, LibraryThing and Shelfari, not to mention Facebook and Twitter. Having the book-club army embrace you is a gift that keeps giving for years. (Read entire article.)

Proverbs Thirty One Woman said...: I don't want to come off as rude, but the author is living on another world. Hardback vs. paperback? How about ebook vs. paper book? Authors are really coming to learn that traditional publishers aren't offering them much and are moving on the the ebook world where they have more control over their book - and earn more from their books, too.; May 15, 2013 at 7:32:00 PM EDT