Ficlets

A reader passed along this interesting link from UK’s Guardian newspaper – for a change someone in print is defending book blogs and their reviewers, from the point of view that while newspaper and magazine critics tend to stick to the “big” books of the day, book bloggers can open your mind to a much wider range of authors, genres and books:

You can write as much as you like and you are completely and utterly independent. Publishers and PR people can’t put any pressure on you. If you feel like it, you can ignore Don DeLillo and write instead about the latest SF or the latest chick-lit or the latest women’s erotica, or even about sword and sorcery for adults. You are free.

You can cast your net as widely as you like, or you can confine yourself to one genre. You can champion books no one has ever heard of. In certain cases, you can improve a writer’s fortunes, by bringing them to the attention of a world that previously knew nothing about them.

Speaking as someone who toils in a genre that doesn’t get a huge amount of mainstream media attention, I can tell you that this is largely correct – there’s far more discussion of my books, and the books of other folks who write in my genre, in the online sphere than in the print sphere. I’ll also go so far to say that much of that commentary and discussion is more useful (or at least, more interesting) than what often is written in print, because the folks writing are devotees of the genre, and they don’t have to worry about writing to space.

The article also makes a salient point about those worried about the inherent quality of online reviewers and book bloggers:

“But why should we believe the blogger?” comes the cry. “Who are they and how are they qualified to tell us what to read?” The answer is: you should believe them and trust them in exactly the same way you would a critic in a newspaper or literary journal. There will be some you admire and some you think are stupid. Some bloggers write well and some badly and so do some literary critics.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just about the most sensible thing anyone’s said on the topic, ever.