But surely the NBA was a constraint on free trade that meant we had to pay artificially inflated prices for books? One reason for the NBA's existence given by the Restrictive Practices Court, when it analysed the agreement in 1962 was that it enabled publishers to subsidise the printing of the works of important but less popular authors by using money from bestsellers. Today, the worry is that the demise of the NBA has meant there is no new generation of British literary talent to follow the likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan.

"There's been a slow bonfire of literary authors in the last 18 months," says Hamilton. "Publishers are sending out to pasture established literary novelists because they realise they aren't going to be sold by the chains. The complaint now from publishers is that most of their quality books hardly get a look in at all. In the past, sales for many literary novels were never very high, but now publishers are cutting down on their lists in desperation."

Hamilton cites the example of the crime novelist Ian Rankin: "Rankin was selling nothing at all for the first few novels he wrote, but publishers knew he would take off and so they kept with him. The opportunity isn't there to do that any more because sales are so low that you lose too much money initially, even if you make money later. That old, very successful business model doesn't make sense any more. Thanks to the prevailing way in which books are sold there would be no new Rankin."

slovobooks

Originally published at The Thoughts of Chairman P. You can comment here or there.

I don’t actively dislike Gordon Brown, but I’m not a particular fan either. However, I do think he is getting a rather rough ride over his handwritten letter to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan. Some of the ‘misspellings’ in the letter, shown on the BBC News, look like natural handwriting foibles that crop up in most peoples handwriting.

I find that brown has gone slightly up in my opinion for bothering to write at all, let alone a personal handwritten letter. I wonder if Blair would have done that, or just sent a letter typed by a junior with his squiggle at the bottom.

By all means attack Brown for his screw-ups, but lets have some fairness when he’s making an effort.

To be fair to the mother though, if I had a kid killed over there, I probably wouldn’t be particularly inclined to give him an easy time either.

Originally published at The Thoughts of Chairman P. You can comment here or there.

I would seriously recommend this book to any students of any age. It helped me a lot at college, and if the current reviews on Amazon are anything to go by, I am by no means the only one. Second hand from just over a quid, or just over a fiver for a new edition, it could be one of the best books you buy as a student.

Use Your Head – Tony Buzan

http://img.metro.co.uk/i/pix/cartoons/nemi/Nemi091109_600x194.gif

Metro

This, on the other hand, is amazing.

The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

"We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus," Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News…

00:02 RT @clanwilliam Best wikipedia editor's query ever: "They are very funny.[citation needed]" (Re Mrs Ackroyd Band, FYI) #

11:04 I've wimped out and turned on the heating. It does make the place somewhat more comfortable... #

15:11 RT @FakeAPStylebook Avoid excessive use of contractions. The baby will come when it comes. <--- groan! #

16:42 Rowling's spell names are physically painful. #

16:42 Other than that, definitely enjoying Order of the Phoenix more than the previous 3 I read -- but still not a fan #

17:48 @annafdd LOL @ Puppy Channel #

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve just been reading an interesting essay on Fingertips, a web site that specializes in music recommendation. The author, Jeremy Schlosberg, has been thinking about the way musicians such as Amanda Palmer operate in the new digital world and Kevin Kelly’s famous “1,000 True Fans” post. Although this is presented as a music issue, it is relevant to writers as well.

The basic idea of Kelly’s post was that if an artist can find 1,000 “true fans” who are willing to pay him or her $100 a year, that’s enough to live off. It is a “long tail” type idea. Schlosberg’s concern is that by focusing on finding these super-fans, musicians will isolate themselves from a wider market, and potentially find themselves trapped into having to provide the sort of art their fans want (that’s a very simplistic version – read the whole thing to get all of the issues). Obviously the same is potentially true of writers.

While I understand the concern, my gut feel is that Schlosberg is wrong. And the reason I feel that way is because I believe it is a mistake to think of these super-fans in isolation from the wider music-listening (or book-reading) audience. You can’t separate the two. Indeed, my own view is that you are only likely to be able to get 1,000 super-fans if the total audience for your work is at least 100,000 people. It goes back to the basic Internet rule that if you put up a work with a “donate” button, only 1% of the people who consume that work (read it, listen to it, use it if is software) will be prepared to pay for it.

It may well be that some writers can become like, to use Schlosberg’s example, jazz musicians, and be supported only by a small and devoted group of fans. But for most writers I’m pretty sure they’ll only get fans prepared to give them money if there’s a much larger group of fans who read them and don’t pay. The existence of these super-fans is predicated on the existence of casual fans.

Matt Jones on his generation of the GET EXCITED AND MAKE THINGS graphic: the point of it, its brief history, and its new Creative Commons license. All of which just gives me an excuse to post it again: