Josh Getzler
During the past few days, there have been two interesting developments that are worth noting, and thinking about if you are a book person and deal at all with the digital world.
The first thing, which happened over the weekend and broke Twitter, was that an author, Kathleen Hale, felt that she was being trolled by a reviewer who gave her latest book one star. She described what she did to engage in an article for the Guardian (UK), which may be found Here. All hell then broke loose, with writers and bloggers and readers taking sides (or at times specifically NOT taking sides) as to whether a writer should engage with a reviewer. Some of the best discussions were written in Jezebel and on Smart Bitches Trashy Books and on Chuck Wendig's blog. For the record, I think it's a very bad idea for an author to engage with a reviewer for many of the reasons that will be apparent if you read all of these articles.
The second thing that happened is that Simon and Schuster and Amazon reached an agreement to stave off an Hachette-like stalemate over ebook pricing. Is this agreement (as well as a few smaller publishers' agreements over the past few weeks) the signs of the dominos beginning to fall in a quasi agency-model fashion (details as to what that means can be found most clearly on Publishers Marketplace), or is this an aberration? For myself, given that the biggest series I represent is coming out in April from Little, Brown--of Hachette--I at least hope we are inching toward industry peace.
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