Catie and Tatiana brought up the issue of YA cover whitewashing a couple of times in their recent reviews. Is it possible that whitewashing is actually a good thing, in terms of promoting diversity? Apparently it is, at least according to a recent Salon article 'Can you identify?' A study shows that white readers are more inclined to identify with minority (race, sexuality, ethnicity) characters if their "diversity" is concealed from the readers until later in a book. A disheartening, but interesting theory. However, Leila over at bookshelves of doom disagrees, using a racist Hunger Games tweets scandal as an example of how this theory doesn't work.
There were a couple of articles this week written by authors whose novels are regularly mistaken for some other books due to title similarities.
In a very a funny post Ruta Sepetys, the author of a historical YA novel Between Shades of Gray, which is often mistaken for a famous title that doesn't require naming anymore, says that even the opening line of her book "They took me in my nightgown" to a wrong reader can have a completely different meaning, foreshadowing titillation instead of intended totalitarianism.
In a very a funny post Ruta Sepetys, the author of a historical YA novel Between Shades of Gray, which is often mistaken for a famous title that doesn't require naming anymore, says that even the opening line of her book "They took me in my nightgown" to a wrong reader can have a completely different meaning, foreshadowing titillation instead of intended totalitarianism.
Over at Pub(lishing) Crawl Leigh Bardugo, whose debut Shadow And Bone is coming out this June, talks about how it feels to be the author of a book with a title that sounds almost exactly like a few other popular titles in the same genre.
If you are interested in the publishing process, the same Pub(lishing) Crawl had a great article this week about how projects are picked for publication (with gifs!). Apparently, it's a rather lengthy, time consuming and financially-motivated process.
At our alma mater Goodreads Patrick Rothfuss leaves a cute note to his overzealous fans who gave his yet unfinished novel 5 stars. We like that he chose not to fixate on his not-so-generous preemptive raters and start a petition to Goodreads to remove them, so unlike some other misguided writers who did this in the past. Maybe Rothfuss read this article in Guardian about the importance of respect for one's fandom?
We wish Charlaine Harris had listened to her fandom though. This week she officially announced that the 13th book in her Sookie Stackhouse series titled Dead Ever After will be the last, and it will be "a total closure. I don’t go back to things once I’ve finished them. That’s kind of what I do. I don’t want to write Sookie after I get stale.” If you remember, we spoke about this series just the other week and we agreed that the series got stale years ago. So, too little too late?
And, to wrap things up, here is a post written by Anna at Literary Exploration on a topic near and dear to our hearts - Book Borrowing Etiquette. Don't we all just hate getting back our precious books in a battered and overall disrespected state? What can we do about it?
That's all for this week's Odds & Ends. Have a great weekend!
If you are interested in the publishing process, the same Pub(lishing) Crawl had a great article this week about how projects are picked for publication (with gifs!). Apparently, it's a rather lengthy, time consuming and financially-motivated process.
At our alma mater Goodreads Patrick Rothfuss leaves a cute note to his overzealous fans who gave his yet unfinished novel 5 stars. We like that he chose not to fixate on his not-so-generous preemptive raters and start a petition to Goodreads to remove them, so unlike some other misguided writers who did this in the past. Maybe Rothfuss read this article in Guardian about the importance of respect for one's fandom?
We wish Charlaine Harris had listened to her fandom though. This week she officially announced that the 13th book in her Sookie Stackhouse series titled Dead Ever After will be the last, and it will be "a total closure. I don’t go back to things once I’ve finished them. That’s kind of what I do. I don’t want to write Sookie after I get stale.” If you remember, we spoke about this series just the other week and we agreed that the series got stale years ago. So, too little too late?
And, to wrap things up, here is a post written by Anna at Literary Exploration on a topic near and dear to our hearts - Book Borrowing Etiquette. Don't we all just hate getting back our precious books in a battered and overall disrespected state? What can we do about it?
That's all for this week's Odds & Ends. Have a great weekend!
