Bookish links 8 Jan: lousy book covers, copyeditor gang warfare and robots in libraries!

RIASS stuff:

Review: My Life in Pea Soup by Lisa Nops'Rating: (A fascinating memoir that blends ex-pat life in Sri Lanka and Bahrain with raising a severely autistic daughter.)

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

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

Other bookish stuff:

The big disruption enterprise opportunity in publishing'When a $ 2 billion company can generate so little attention to a product where it has 85+% equity, you have to wonder about its marketing investment and quality. In fairness, as with Apple, some books/authors do get special attention but the average author is encouraged/expected to make their own marketing investment. I did for the first book, but dramatically scaled it' back for the second one. With just a 15% stake, I had little incentive to, and asked the publisher to free up a specific marketing budget. They said they would but if they did it was not transparent.

Frances Hardinges books of 2012 (and if you havent read Hardinge, you must.)

The Lousy Book Covers Tumblr.'

Maria Popova on why we need an antidote to Google'I worry about the temporal bias of the web ' everything online is based around vertical chronology. The latest stuff floats at the top, and the older stuff sinks towards the bottom. It suggests that just because something is more recent, its more relevant; yet, in culture, the best ideas are timeless, they have no expiration date. This makes the internet a tricky medium for organising information and prioritising knowledge. The best thing is the obvious thing ' the remarkable access to nearly infinite information.

An interview with Francine Prose''One Hundred Years of Solitude convinced me to drop out of Harvard graduate school. The novel reminded me of everything my Ph.D. program was trying to make me forget. Thank you, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Joe R Lansdale on writing'It's not the place. It's the story. And most of all, it's the writer who tells the story, and how he tells it.'Would-be writers often tell me how they're waiting for the right time or a good place to work, and I think that's all well and good, but most of them have been waiting a long, long time, and it is my guess they will continue to wait. They don't have the drive, the real urge to be a writer.

What to watch for publishing in 2013'a lot of shopping and purchasing decisions for young reading are going to take place outside of any environment that one could say now exists. And that's going to be true pretty soon.

Hilarious piece from The Onion about copyeditor gang warfare

Natalie Kelly on her book publishing experience (this sort of stuff cant be learned from books, eh, eh?) 'A good book is no guarantee of success. Imagine the futility of serving an exquisite dinner at an empty table and hoping to be named an award-winning chef. Who will know if you dont tell them? Writing the book is only a tiny part of the work that goes into making it successful. It surprised me to learn that speaking skills are perhaps more important in some ways than writing skills when it comes to book promotion.

Amazingly cool library. Warning: contains ROBOTS!

Some thoughts on gender in speculative fiction'Includes a discussion about whether gendered experiences subtly influence focus, and also reader misconceptions when encountering a female name on an SFF title.

Elizabeth Lheude, creator of the Australian Women Writers challenge, is asking whether we need a separate challenge for male writers. The responses are interestingly, and largely negative. (For my part, I could see the point of a general Australian Writers challenge, but not an Australian Male Writers challenge.)

Great post about trends in YA, and why everyone, everywhere is sick to death of trends.'All art forms are prone to trends and fashions. In art, they are called 'movements' and a successful film or TV series is bound to give rise to imitators. Why would fiction be any different? I don't really think this can be said enough, but trend-predicting as writers is a sure way to go insane. Especially when I was unpublished it was hella tempting to scour the bookshelves for what would catch the eye of an agent or publisher, but now having met agents and publishers the same things catch their eyes in 2013 as in 2008 when I started: gripping plots; original and authentic voices; beautiful prose and intriguing characters.'This is the only trend there has ever been.