Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘social networking’

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By the Numbers

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Several months ago, during AWP, a young writer approached the FWR table while I was working the bookfair. He asked about our organization, and I happily launched into my usual pitch about our mission–to promote and support the work of emerging writers, as well as to re-professionalize writing about writing. We chatted a bit about some of the content I was excited we’d soon be publishing on the site, about some of the conference events that he and I had each attended, and so on. It was normal bookfair banter. But when I asked the young man what sort of […]


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Thursday Morning Candy: Noting:books

by Celeste Ng

We’ve talked about writing notes in the margins of books quite a bit on FWR, but what if you want to keep track of those notes over the long term, or share those notes with other people? Noting:books can help you do just that. Says the site: Noting:books is a collection of microblogs (“notebooks”) — individual readers tracking the books they’ve read and noting their thoughts. You can look through any person’s notebook, or you can look at the page for any book to see everyone’s notes on it. […] To start your own notebook, all you need to do […]


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Can Discovereads predict which books you'll like?

by Celeste Ng

How do you decide what books to read next? Do you judge by the cover? Do you buy what’s handy and cheap? You could get a recommendation from a friend, but that can be risky. Enter Discovereads, a startup now run by Goodreads. Rate at least 10 books, and the site uses an algorithm to “learn your personal tastes” and recommend books it thinks you’ll like. Goodreads plans to add Discovereads to its own site soon, as well. The New York Times’s “Bits” blog reports: Otis Chandler, Goodreads’s founder and chief executive, says the site [Goodreads] has been an online […]


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Got 10 Minutes? Save Publishing!

by Celeste Ng

Supply and demand is the basic rule of economics. But will it work for books? Author Sean Cummings thinks so. He’s created a Facebook group and an accompanying website called “Save Publishing! Read a Book at Bedtime.” The site’s rationale: Read what you like. A magazine, a newspaper or a book. Read it in print or on an eBook reader or an iPad – whatever. Just ten minutes a night, a tiny commitment but an important one. If enough people will commit to reading at bedtime for ten minutes, they’ll eventually finish the books they’re reading. If they continue to […]


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Reviews from the Younger Set

by Celeste Ng

Here at Fiction Writers Review, many of our contributors are emerging writers, so we love sites that encourage those early in their writing careers. Recently I heard of a few sites that encourage those really early in their writing careers: kids and young adults. On The Huffington Post, Monica Edinger, a teacher at New York’s prestigious Dalton School, writes about an afterschool book blogging club she and several other instructors founded: Every week these literary enthusiasts come to my room; sift through my books and advance reader copies; choose to read whatever catches their fancy; and, after reading them, write […]


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The dangers of book recommendations

by Celeste Ng

Since I’m a writer, friends often ask me for book recommendations. It’s incredibly difficult to predict what people will like based on other things they’ve liked. Netflix offered a million dollars, literally, to anyone who could improve their predictions on what viewers would enjoy based on other movies they’d enjoyed. It’s marginally easier to make predictions if you know the person—but it’s infinitely more risky. Suddenly your knowledge of literature AND your knowledge of your friend are tested. Ross loved Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You, so would he like Aimee Bender? David Foster Wallace? Wells Tower? […]


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Tao Lin: Literary guerilla marketer for the Internet era?

by Celeste Ng

Salon.com’s Daniel B. Roberts profiles Tao Lin, an emerging writer with an eye for unusual self-marketing opportunities. Lin has sold “shares” of his novel Richard Yates—$2000 for 10% of the domestic profits. He’s also auctioned off a package of goodies—including a T-shirt, an unpublished draft of a short story, and a “unique drawing of a Sasquatch holding a hamburger”—on his blog. And he engages with his readers directly using the internet and social networking, even posting his phone number online. Judging by his blog’s URL—http://heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com/—Lin has a sense of humor about his work and his own marketing. But Roberts doesn’t […]




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