I'm a columnist over at bookslut.com, thanks to finding that lovely site from your journal, and sadly the webzine is in financial trouble, thanks to a merciless site hosting company. Jessa Crispin, our Editor In Chief is trying to keep our webmagazine afloat by opening a cafe press shop at
http://www.cafeshops.com/bookslut
And there is also a tip jar for the philanthropically inclined.
http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/pay/TAU65NXDZMUWG/058-7922897-4692022
If you could mention these sites on your very popular and very cool webjournal it would mean so much to everyone at bookslut.
Easily done. Bookslut -- at www.bookslut.com -- is one of my favourite book-related sites, and the bookslut blog is required reading for links to literary articles, sometimes of a scurrilous nature and sometimes just really informative and useful. Those who love literature, or even those who just meet literature occasionally in out of the way motels for a hasty tryst, should be reading it.
It's certainly a site I want to keep around, so I'll do an Amazon.com donation. (There. I one-clicked them $20.)
There was a quote on an article about book sales several weeks ago they linked to on the bookslut blog that still sticks in my craw, and I meant to grumble about it at the time. It included a peculiarly irrelevant line from an unnamed editor of a "huge-selling magazine" who was astonished to find that "last year's hit novel" Everything is Illuminated had only sold 100,000 in hardback, which she thought a very small number of books, and said that if she only sold a hundred thousand copies of her magazine she'd be fired, or words to that effect. Which seemed really weird: you can't equate a monthly periodical funded by advertising with a book, especially not a hardback book (hardbacks tend to sell about a quarter of what paperbacks do "out of the gate" and then they keep selling for a long time). Which means it's a good bet that Everything is Illuminated will go on to sell another half a million copies in paperback at the very least. And "last year's hit novel" doesn't mean it was the bestselling novel of the year, or even that 100,000 copies in hardback is anywhere near as high as things get (Coraline's sold more than that in hardback, for heaven's sake.) Nor does it take into account that one reason why national magazines sell so many copies is that they don't sell so many copies -- the magazines get returned in bundles, for credit, and they have their own scams to inflate numbers of readers and subscribers in order to up their advertising rates. (It also fails to notice the huge difference in price and function between a magazine and a hardback book, and is, as a quote, as relevant to what is or is not happening in publishing as quoting a chocolate chip cookie manufacturer as saying "Cosmopolitan sells 1.2 million magazines a month? If I only sold 1.2 million chocolate chip cookies I'd lose my job!") There. That feels better. Go and read the bookslut blog and click on Jessa's links, for they are cool. Or buy a mug.
Okay. Back to packing, recharging my iPod, and going to Spain. Also to puzzling over whether Warren Zevon's song "My Ride's Here" (which I found on the Uncut Best of 2002, on the iPod) would or wouldn't be such a good song if it hadn't been written by someone who knew he was dying, about, well, checking out.