Link Soup
It’s been a very busy few weeks with the move and a bit of work travel, but things are seemingly starting to calm down a bit to almost manageable levels. So, here are few things that have caught my eye lately.
- John Scalzi is saying some interesting things about YA fiction – it sounds like I may need to read more of it.
- Cory Doctorow has an interesting article over at Locus – with the main point seemingly being that advance reviews on the internet do little for sales. I’m not sure I entirely agree on the point – for example, I believe that a fair amount of Patrick Rothfuss’ success is due to the effective building of pre-release buzz by Daw’s marketing group. I also get a bit defensive in his bit about blogs, which wasn’t entirely negative, but still felt like a low blow – I know I my technorati ranking is well above 4 (I think its 52 at the moment, though it’s been as high as the mid-90s in the past). Then, I’m not a hug fan of the way technorati does things since it doesn’t account for message boards and other ‘regular’ website links and I’ve found it often doesn’t count international links, but I digress.
- My friend Larry of the OF Blog has taken a step into the freelance world with a for-hire review at Strange Horizons of Joe Abercrombie’s Last Argument of Kings. I hear he’s got something in the works with Jeff VanderMeer and Amazon for a review of the forthcoming Carloz Ruiz Zafón book.
- The Fantasy Book Critic reviews Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Last Wish. He didn’t like it as much as I did (or Larry and Adam), but enjoyed it more than Pat. In my opinion, many ‘Western’ people are not fully appreciating some of the ‘non-Western’ aspects of this book that really made it work well for me.
- Adam Roberts reviews Richard Morgan’s forthcoming The Steel Remains – it is a fun piece of writing in and of itself. A tangential discussion arose at Westeros over the literary value of NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- A major volcanic eruption in Chile – stuff like this always interests me.
- Reno suffers through an earthquake swarm – is a big one yet to come?
- A sinkhole swallows Texas (well a small part of it anyway).
5 comments:
I think Doctorow does have a point, in as much as there's quite a bit of copying/linking that goes on from blog to blog. Take the number of people who link to something said at a larger blog, whether it be from an author or someone like Pat or even you and I. By the time you get down to that level, you're talking about an audience of making a few dozen (at best) a day and those constitute the 90% or so on Technorati that have fewer than 50 links.
Thanks for the plug and yes, there's quite a bit in the works in regards to Zafón's El juego del Ángel, including a translated interview, at least two and likely three reviews on the OF Blog and linked to on a few Amazon pages (one of which will be in Spanish).
And speaking of Sapkowski, I hope to have a review in a couple of weeks of his second collection which currently is not scheduled for English-language publication: The Sword of Destiny.
But the more important question is this: will that eruption have a cooling effect on our weather this summer, since it took place in the temperate part of the Southern Hemisphere?
-Larry...I'm not really saying that Doctorow doesn't have a point, just that it gets me a bit defensive.
As for the warming issue - the last I read on it, the eruption hasn't released enough sulfate gasses to have much of an impact on global climate (so far, several hundred times less than Pinatubo did in the '90s). And with it being far enough south in the southern hemisphere it's likely that atmospheric ciculation patterns would limit its global effect. *yep, I'm a real geek about this sort of thing*
Thanks for the linkage Ken! Perhaps I'll appreciate the next release more :)
As far as linking to articles from other blogs, I've always been an advocate of that and believe that networking can be quite effective if more blogs would do it...
The defensiveness is understandable. And good to know that my suspicions were right in regards to the global air patterns (teaching middle school geography has taught me something, after all! :P)
I enjoyed what Scalzi had to say about YA fiction and I've certainly read my share of it over the years that I really enjoy. I always hit that section of the bookstore whenever I am in just to see what is new.
I get defensive when people criticize or denigrate blogs or bloggers also. Whether they have a point or not it always seems to smack of a bit of sour grapes and I also don't see the wisdom of alienating one's readers by criticizing them, even off-handedly. Not sure I agree with his math. My site is a pitiful thing in comparison to many others and yet I can lay claim to in some small way influencing others, more than three, to buy books and have certainly purchased many books because of other blogger's reviews, yours included. To say that internet reviews don't sell books seems to be a bit backwards thinking in this day and age when the internet is crowding out every other form of reviewing. I don't understand why it bothers people so much that the common man has a voice and that other common men listen. Strange...
I know of several books that got big publicity because of internet buzz. I too am saying he has a point with some of what he has to say but I don't agree with it all and think he is way off base in some areas.
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