Remember that Choose Your Own Adventure book series? It was completely corny, but what a fun concept. You were the protagonist who got some story background, and then presented with a problem. Once you read the problem, you got to choose what you would do and turn to the recommended page for your choice. From there, you would learn more, and then get to make another choice until at the end, presumably you, the reader, had created your own adventure reading experience. And the next time you encountered the book, you could make different choices. As I young reader, I thought they were fun books. I kind of wish that navigating the publishing world were more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I…
Jenn Falls – My Writing Journey
Posts tagged “James Patterson”
There’s a lot of discussion about the book business and changes affecting it in recent months and more specifically recently with James Patterson’s book future ad in the New York Times Review and in Neil Gaiman’s 2013 London Book Fair speech. There’s also a lot of fear being bandied about – fear of the change of book form, fear of the loss of bookstores and libraries, fear of the shrinking of traditional publishing, fear of the online services that promotes the changes. That’s a lot of monsters under the proverbial bed of books. Patterson’s ad is full of implied problems that create these fears. Accusations such as that there are “no serious publishers with passionate, dedicated, idealistic editors” and questions like, “Who will discover…
This weekend on the back of the New York Times Review, James Patterson took out an ad on the back that asked about the future of books. Here’s what the text reads: “Who will save our books? Our bookstores? Our libraries? If there are no bookstores, no libraries, no serious publishers with passionate, dedicated, idealistic editors, what will happen to our literature? Who will discover and mentor new writers? Who will publish our important books? What will happen if there are no more books like these? Following list included 37 books considered classics in different genres and with a mix of diverse authors. “The Federal Government has stepped in to save banks, and the automobile industry, but where are they on the subject of…
Falls Into Writing 