Bookish links 10 Dec: the booksellers role, devaluing authors work, creatingsuspense more!

RIASS stuff:

Occupational hazards: can writing ruin your love of reading?

Mr Darcy and The Awkward Man: the perils of shyness in literature

Review: Nikki and the Lone Wolf/Mardie and the City Surgeon by Marion Lennox'Rating: 'Runaway pups and country lovin'. Aw.

Other bookish stuff:

Ten Australian books to read before you die

Former sex worker Annika Cleave may have faked her memoir'Mattress Actress'All my journalistic instincts are telling me this woman isn't everything she claims to be. For me, this makes her far more fascinating than the picture she paints in'Mattress Actress. Questions such as these come to mind: Why did she do it? What does she hope to get out of it? How did she think she was going to get away with it?

Michelle from Book to the Future on not writing'I have to force myself to sit down and concentrate on my writing. I have to bribe myself like a child ''one more paragraph and you can get up;'just finish editing this draft and you can go to bed. I use an app to cut myself off from the internet so I don't end up ricocheting between Facebook and Twitter.'Sitting under the purple flowers (which were falling to the ground all around me) in my absurd orange cardigan, I started to think about why I write'

The former Borders UK CEO is opening an independent bookshop in Surrey

A Year of Reading: Jeffrey Eugenides'I've always loved Sharon Olds's poetry but her new book has kept me up reading at night.'The poems circle around a central trauma, a mid-life divorce, and take the narrator through all the stages of this profound grief

Ben Schrank on writing novels'Most, if not all, writers work through several drafts. The concept of the writer writing and then throwing material away is not new. But they never say they liked doing it. Julian Barnes says of first drafts in an interview with the'Paris Review: The pleasure of the first draft lies in deceiving yourself that it is quite close to the real thing. The pleasure of the subsequent drafts lies partly in realising that you haven't been gulled by the first draft.

Kate Morton on the role of the bookseller'A bookseller is a person who sells books. And yet booksellers do much, much more than that. A bookseller is a listener, an empathiser, a supplier, a matchmaker. They are one of Malcolm Gladwell's connectors: people with a whole shop of shelves loaded with good friends, just waiting to go home with somebody.

An agents manifesto'The book industry needs to listen to authors and readers more so we can win back the argument that publishing is filled with skilled professionals seeking excellence in their fields, determined to publish works of commercial and cultural significance. Amazon is not the devil, but a different route. Booksellers need support; but they, in turn, need to bring a higher level of service to their customers.

Lee Child on creating and maintaining suspense'Writers are taught to focus on ingredients and their combinationBut it's really much simpler than that. How do you bake a cake? has the wrong structure. It's too indirect. The right structure and the right question is: How do you make your family hungry?'And the answer is: You make them wait four hours for dinner.'As novelists, we should ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story, and then we should delay the answer.

Agents shouldnt take commission on authors self-published work'It sounds crazy to me (for an agent to get commission on an author's self-published work). I think it has to do with old-style agenting agreements that haven't moved on and reflected the different ways that authors might participate in that relationship. We do have contracts with commission income, of course, but that's based on our doing the work, not on the author doing the work, says Clare Alexander.

An interview with Libba Bray'Having never written fantasy before the Gemma books, learning how to establish rules and internal logic proved particularly challenging. I am really grateful for the wise counsel of Holly Black who is the absolute Queen of YA Fantasy and who forced me to think about those rules-y things that usually make me want to hop on the back of a fictional Harley, spit out my toothpick, and snarl, Rules? I don't need no stinkin' rules where I'm driving!

On cheap pricing and devaluing authors work'Writing books is hard work. We spend years, at it, alone at our desks, lonely, full of self-doubt, sometimes with no idea where the next paragraph is going to come from, despairing at every disappointing sales figure or bad review. We live in a permanent state of financial insecurity, never knowing when the next cheque is going to arrive or whether the next contract will be renewed. Yes, we love what we do, but we and our families need to eat. We deserve to be paid for our work just as you deserve to be paid for yours.

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