The weekly links, opinion, and personal updates post

1. Links of Interest

Fascinating discussion of steampunk over at The Book Smugglers led by guest poster and author Meljean Brook.

Laura Vivanco at Teach Me Tonight is asking What is at the Core of the Genre? Is it reproduction (both literal and of the existing social order)? Is it comedy (smoothing a transition to a new social order)? Is it the transformative value of love? Go read and share your view.

As most of you know by now, Rachel Potter has resigned from All About Romance, due to a “reading funk”. I made a donation to my local Rape Response Services to mark the occasion. For those who are fretting that we have lost a rare and precious anti-women perspective on sexual assault, this post detailing the ways that the discourse of victim-blaming for sexual assault dominates speech might be soothing.

[Updated to add: The Sexist at Washington City Paper cites the Rachel Potter debacle.]

An interesting project at Harvard, Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership and Reading History:

an online exploration of the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard Libraries. For Internet users worldwide, Reading provides unparalleled digital access to a significant selection of unique source materials. … [including] historical textbooks that document the principles, and some of the biases, in reading instruction from the 18th to the early 20th centuries

Over at Risky Regencies, Janet Mullany is talking about being Jewish during the Regency:

Other than Heyer’s casual, racist (but probably historically accurate) references to moneylenders and Nita Abram’s brilliant Courier Series about an Anglo-Jewish family during the Napoleonic wars, I didn’t know much about the Jewish population of Regency London. I still don’t. But I’ll share what I have.

Historical romance authors Lauren Willig and Cara Elliott, who are team teaching a course on romance fiction at Yale, were guests at The Ruby Slippered Sisterhood, and some of their students chimed in. Great discussion.

Why Crime Novelists Don’t Get Women by Christopher Rice, over at the Daily Beast (Hat tip Book Ninja)

Most women in crime novels and thrillers are such terrible clichés, says novelist Christopher Rice. He identifies the four most common and ridiculous ones—and says writers should stop being so lazy.

Over at Unusual Historicals, author Lorelei Brown is talking about Penny Dreadfuls, “a whole genre of fiction decried as trash and pilloried as not worth the time it took to read it.”

2. Books, Blogs and Marketing

Rebecca at the Book Lady’s Blog is meditating On Books, Blogs, and Marketing.

It seems that, for a certain subset of the blogging community, “marketing” is a four-letter word, and the bloggers who eschew it are somehow more authentic or noble than those who embrace it. It also seems that many bloggers don’t really know what they’re talking about when they’re talking about marketing.

But marketing is not always about a product or service. It is not always about leading up to sales.

Marketing is about creating and affecting awareness, and it’s not just businesses who use marketing. Non-profit organizations, charities, schools, etc. all use marketing to make the public aware of them and to affect the public’s perception of them (hopefully in a positive direction) in order to gain support, funding, you know the drill.

And we, all of us who talk about and review books on our blogs, are engaged in marketing every single day.

And…

If you post about a book that even one person who reads your blog has not previously heard of, or if your review changes even one person’s mind about that book (making them either more or less inclined to read it), you are engaging in marketing.

if you use Twitter, Facebook, Ning, or any social networking site to discuss your blog or your book reviews, you are MARKETING your blog. Even if you just post links to your blog on that site or include your URL in your member profile, you are marketing your blog. When you comment on other blogs (an act that is likely to introduce others to you and your blog), you are marketing. It’s a passive form of marketing—allowing others to discover the link without your directing them to it—but it is still marketing.

I appreciate Rebecca’s effort to think about self-promotion, and have been a proponent of being more reflective about, and taking more responsibility for, our complicated overlapping relationships with people whose job it really is to market themselves or their products. I also agree with her that people who criticize bloggers merely for actively branding themselves or trying to grow or monetize their blogs need to get a life (she put it more diplomatically than that).

I have blogged on this topic before, and here’s what I wrote then:

Being a part of the promotional machine is not something only weak, bad, or dishonest book bloggers do. We all do it. Sure, from my point of view, I am merely talking about the books I read with other readers. But from industry’s point of view (and sometimes also from my own), the strength of my speech can be harnessed to achieve other effects. The fact that we don’t intend all the consequences of our actions doesn’t necessarily make us less responsible for them. If the social media experts are being totally upfront about using informal web 2.0 relationships to sell books, then I don’t see why we can’t also be honest about this aspect of book blogging, talk about it, and try to maximize benefits and minimize harms that may result from it.

But Rebecca’s use of the term “marketing” in this particular way is problematic for me. Either she is using the term “marketing” — which normally refers to conscious, planful efforts to bring buyers and sellers together to facilitate an exchange of goods or services — to describe so many activities that her use of it has little relation to the term as most people understand it, or she is mischaracterizing what many of us are doing in the book blogosphere.

To take the first option: is any attempt to create awareness of yourself in the public sphere really best described by the term “marketing”? When I am at a party and and introduce myself to a person I haven’t met, I am thereby creating awareness, but am I marketing? When I raise my voice to my unruly children in a Target parking lot (purely fictional, I assure you) and draw stares, I am creating awareness, but am I marketing? When I send an invitation to my son’s birthday party, I am not only deliberately creating awareness but actively encouraging participation in an event. But is this best described as “marketing”?

It’s counterintutive to broaden the definition so much. And I don’t think doing so will actually have the effect Rebecca seems to desire, which is to deflect criticism away from bloggers who really are trying to sell something, be it ad space or a book. Why not just admit that some bloggers, some of the time, are marketing (while they are doing other things, surely), and think about what specific issues that practice may raise?

More basically, we need to think about who is doing what, so we can get clear on how to assess it. There is a difference between what happens and what I do ( a difference between events and actions), and figuring out a person’s intentions is significant for deciding which among a set of plausible actions a behavior actually manifests.

Here’s a famous poetic version of this philosophical point (totally gratuitous, but I couldn’t resist):

Not Waving but Drowning

by Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

So, sure, when I Tweet or comment on your blog using my website URL, maybe that has the effect of increasing awareness of my blog (although even that’s a stretch), but since that’s not my intention in doing it, it is not, in a very important sense, what I am doing. Rather, I am having a discussion about a book or about something related to books.

Many of us are not actively trying to grow our blogs. We just want our little piece of the web where we can say what we want and chat with people about issues of mutual interest. My blog is a virtual version of me, a virtual version of what I do when I talk to people in real life. On Rebecca’s view, it looks like the only way I can avoid being engaged 100% of the time in marketing, in real life or on line, is to mask my identity, or constantly change it, so that no one comes to have an awareness of me as an individual.

The only thing marketers care about is meeting the needs of potential consumers, so they can attract more of them. And they don’t care necessarily who those consumers are. Like most bloggers, I choose my online interactions carefully.  My online interactions are about interpersonal connection. To go back to the birthday party example, I invite my son’s friends. I am not trying to pack my house with as many children as possible, regardless of who they are or their relationship with my child. Marketing may utilize interpersonal connection, but for an external end: selling something. In contrast, for most bloggers, the personal interaction is the inherently valuable good.

In sum, since, on any reasonable definition, marketing is not merely creating awareness, but creating awareness of a product or service one is trying to sell (and yes, nonprofits sell things), I am not (usually) marketing anything. To describe all of my internet activities  as “marketing” rather than as “participating in a conversation about fiction in a community of like minded readers” mischaracterizes what I am doing here in a way that I really don’t like, not only because it’s too simplistic to be right, but because it totally bypasses the inherent good of human interaction, and it implies that there is no noncommercial speech about anything that can be bought or sold, including books.

That may be a marketer’s dream, but it’s not my reality, at least not yet.

3. Personal/Apple

My favorite place to play is on the web on my Macbook. Unfortunately, most of my work is also on my MacBook. It’s not that I don’t get my work done, it’s that I am always multitasking — constantly responding to email dings, Tweetdeck sounds, “checking” something online that doesn’t really need to be checked right now, etc. It’s not conducive to peace of mind or productivity.

So I am happy to report that I just discovered a great, easy to use (unlike Leechblock, which was cumbersome) program for Macs or Windows systems, Freedom, which

locks you offline for a selected time interval – anywhere from 15 minutes to 8 hours. Freedom keeps you offline: To circumvent it, you need to reboot your computer. Rebooting is a hassle, so Freedom proves to a be a pretty effective way to help you concentrate and get work done.

There is a freeware version for Macs. The windows version is $10.

Speaking of my Macbook, a word about Apple: Did you see that Apple just changed its mind about allowing a Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist’s app? From The New York Times‘s coverage:

Political cartoons, it turns out, can violate Apple’s license agreement with developers, which states that applications, or “apps,” can be rejected if the content “may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic or defamatory.”

Apparently over 5000 apps have been banned, mostly due to sexual content, which Steve Jobs is on record saying will not be allowed, but the cartoonist situation is not the first time (or the second or the …) Apple has banned political content. (On the other hand, a Mein Kampf app with a nice Swastika logo, and Playboy, passed muster on the first try!).

Think this has nothing to do with e-books? Check out this article at Teleread

It also leaves e-books, and iBooks, in a position of ambiguity. Is iBooks going to enforce similar family-friendly values, rejecting erotica novels and books with harsh language? Probably not.

We’ve already covered the rejection of an e-book app for making it possible to read the Project Gutenberg edition of the Kama Sutra, and the rejection of an appbook version of David Carnoy’s novel Knife Music because it contained use of the “f-word”.

I think these questions will only get thornier as our conception of a “book” morphs and changes, making it harder and harder to distinguish them from apps and from other electronic media. I’ve noticed that Apple, in sharp contrast to Amazon, gets a bit of a pass in the book blogosphere, but I think some of their business practices are well worth worrying about, and potentially much more problematic than DRM.

Finally, things are still very busy for me as I head into the final stretch of the academic year. Unless I am unusually productive, the forecast for blogging this week continues to be “occasional” and “light”. And that includes responding to comments on this post.

HAPPY WEEK!