Bookish links 7 Jan: dear unfinished books, hype in book promo, Tolkien vs Hollywood more!

RIASS stuff:

Hi all! After taking a bit of a break for the holidays, Im back for 2013. Reviews will resume shortly, as will other posts (although Im considering reducing the frequency of my bookish links posts in favour of writing more feature articles and interviews instead. Well see.)

Memoirs as narratives and January First by Michael Schofield'Rating: (this one was fascinating, but gave me the heebies)

Happy New Year Giveaway Hop: The New Year's Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini'(open to all)

Complementary colours and A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty'Rating: (oh, how I loved this one)

Well-behaved Women and Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career'Rating: (who doesnt love Franklins Sybylla?)

Other bookish stuff:

Kate Stanton with an open letter to all of the unfinished books on her nightstand'I wanted so badly to improve my knowledge of the global financial crisis and dividends and the eurozone, Timely Non-Fiction Book By An Economist, I duped myself into buying you. Has anyone ever finished you? Who are these people? Are they fun? Do they own a television? They probably enjoy Lars Von Trier movies and standing in line at the grocery store.

Whats that? A proof-reading game app?'Im going to download this and review it shortly. Stay tuned!

Whatever happened to true irreverence in comedy?'It's a pity that the word'irreverent'has lost its weight, so that it's come to seem a mere synonym for'cheeky. The Pythons were irreverent in the deepest sense. They had automatic respect for nothing. Everything was fit matter for comedy: religion, national differences, cannibalism, Hitler, torture, death, crucifixion. They created a parallel world in which nothing was serious. They were like boys: they not only weren't afraid; they didn't know they should be afraid.

Women are increasingly taking out all of the big literary awards'Im not sure the writing is different, just that people are able to see it. We consign all these really talented women to the midlist and we over-notice what the men do. Theres so much more attention for Nick Hornby, David Nicholls and Tony Parsons than for Marian Keyes and Jojo Moyes, says'Cathy Rentzenbrink from the Bookseller.

Christopher Tolkien hates what Hollywood is doing to his fathers books'They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25, Christopher says regretfully. And it seems that'The Hobbit'will be the same kind of film.

The role of hype in book promotion'Just because something is shoved in our face and lauded as amazing, that doesn't mean we'll automatically take the bait. Au contraire, many will avoid the book as a result. Overall, I think we all play a role in the creation of hype. True hype is formed by the readers, through word-of-mouth and recommendationsIn the end, readers will make or break a book, not hype.

Rachael Johns on using category tropes to plan a category romance title

Jeff Bridges is making the new'The Giver movie

Topical reprise: cheap ebooks and how they undermine authors'The ebook market increasingly runs on a wholesale model. Heres how it works: the publisher produces a book and sets an RRP of, say, ?10. The retailer then says: we need this book from you at, say, 55 per cent discount. So the publisher gets ?4.50 per book and the retailer then sells it for whatever it wants. The 20p ebooks represent a huge percentage loss for the retailer. But longer-term market share gains are what booksellers such as Amazon, who have seriously deep pockets, have in mind: they can always increase costs after everyone else has gone out of business.

On epic fantasy and world-building'The type of immersion that a massive built world provides is unique. Its an almost physical sense of getting lost somewhere that isnt home, but which comes to be home. A sense that one is walking, sometimes even dancing, on a tightrope between the fantastic and the mundane.