The Thursday Book Beat: Atwood’s Latest Book Will Be Unread For 100 Years

Photograph by Ardo Omer. Books. Reading. Thursday Book Beat.

Forbes’ “The World’s Top Earning Authors List” Is Up

  1. James Patterson ($90 mil)
  2. Dan Brown ($28 mil)
  3. Nora Roberts ($23 mil)
  4. Danielle Steele ($22 mil)
  5. Janet Evanovich ($20 mil)

+Jeff Kinney ($17 mil)/Veronica Roth ($17 mil)/John Grisham ($17 mil)/Stephen King ($17 mil)

Veronica Roth is the young newbie as well as the 7th woman to show up on the list that consists of 17 people. She’s enjoying a four way tie between genre heavy hitters – John Grisham and Stephen King – as well as fellow children’s author Jeff Kinney. The power of YA is strong in this one.

Tolstoy Turns 186th Despite Dying in 1910

Leo Tolstoy. September 9th 2014. Google. Google Doodle.

Celebrating the birthdays of people who can no longer age is weird but that’s humans for you. Leo Tolstoy, author of Anna Karenina and War & Peace, would’ve been 186 years old this past Tuesday had he lived. Google honoured the Russian novelist with a Doodle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODnDJaBewmw#t=13

The author’s real name is Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.

Russell Edwards. Naming Jack The Ripper. September 9th 2014. Lyons Press.Jack The Ripper’s Identity Is Outed…Or Is It?

The amateur detective and author of the new book, Naming Jack The Ripper, is claiming to have solved the mystery of the serial killer that terrified London in 1888. Russell Edwards bought the shawl of murder victim, Catherine Eddowes, during an auction and he was told by the former owner that his ancestor, Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson, had asked his superiors if he could take the shawl home to his wife who was a dressmaker despite being covered in blood.

I’m not sure what’s more crazy: taking evidence of a murder to your wife hoping she could make something interesting with it or thinking that any DNA evidence could be used to credibly find out who Jack The Ripper was. Edwards took the shawl to molecular biology professor, Jari Louhelainen, to have a DNA test done which determined that Aaron Kosminski, a polish immigrant, was the Ripper and who was later admitted to an insane asylum. Look, Kosminski could very well be the Ripper (he was one of the suspects at the time) but we’ll never know definitively since that shawl could have decades upon decades of additional DNA. That’s what I call reasonable doubt.

Full Fathom Five Launches Digital Imprint

Digital imprints are the new thing in publishing as self published authors and eBooks grow in popularity. James Frey’s Full Fathom Five’s digital imprint will be known simply as Full Fathom Five Digital. The Apartment, the first book in Amanda Black’s romantic series,  will be the first ebook from the imprint and the series is scheduled to have a book “released every following Wednesday through the end of the year.” Full Fathom Five is also celebrating thel aunch of the imprint with a fiction contest that will award $10, 000 and a publishing contract to the winner. Contest will run from October 1 to November 30. 

Atwood’s Latest Work Won’t Be Seen for 100 Years

Margaret Atwood has been asked by The Future Library project to contribute an unpublished and unread manuscript to be locked away for 100 years. 

Atwood has just been named as the first contributor to an astonishing new public artwork. The Future Library project, conceived by the award-winning young Scottish artist Katie Paterson, began, quietly, this summer, with the planting of a forest of 1,000 trees in Nordmarka, just outside Oslo. It will slowly unfold over the next century. Every year until 2114, one writer will be invited to contribute a new text to the collection, and in 2114, the trees will be cut down to provide the paper for the texts to be printed – and, finally, read.

You can read more about the story here.

Your Non-Fiction Book Might Not Be So Reliable

It seems like the publishing isn’t in the business of fact-checking their books.

“When I was working on my book, I did an anecdotal survey asking people: Between books, magazines, and newspapers, which do you think has the most fact-checking?” explained Craig Silverman, author of Regret the Error, a book on media accuracy, and founder of a blog by the same name. Almost inevitably, the people Silverman spoke with guessed books.

“A lot of readers have the perception that when something arrives as a book, it’s gone through a more rigorous fact-checking process than a magazine or a newspaper or a website, and that’s simply not that case,” Silverman said. He attributes this in part to the physical nature of a book: Its ink and weight imbue it with a sense of significance unlike that of other mediums.

This blew my mind and the articles uses examples of controversies surrounding facts that weren’t actually facts citing James Frey and Somaly Mam.

Jeff Kinney

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Ardo Omer

Ardo Omer

Former WWAC editor. Current curmudgeon and Batman's personal assistant. Icon art by Diana Sim.

2 thoughts on “The Thursday Book Beat: Atwood’s Latest Book Will Be Unread For 100 Years

    1. I just love the idea, though. I hope authors are writing this future library into their spec fic novels RIGHT NOW

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