Links for 2010-07-22

"A few years ago I compiled a list of online astronomy resources for writers following that year's Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. Every year there are new links we pass around and discuss, so I wanted to do an addendum, if you will, adding more links to the ones I've previously posted (and which I feel are still excellent resources)."

"One of a book publicist's jobs is to get reviews for books. Which is tricky these days, what with the shrinking book sections (accompanied by shrinking staffs). According to an April post on GalleyCat, traditional publishing houses published almost 300,000 books in 2009. Now count the number of book reviews in your local newspaper. Or on your favorite book blog.

This isn't news, of course. We've all known for years that book sections were getting leaner. But the other day, Murderati had a post by Tess Gerritsen about what book editors are up against and I thought it was really informative and fun because she took some photos. Gerritsen visited the offices of The Philadelphia Inquirer, where an editor told her that the newspaper receives 800 books for review consideration every month. Once the book department has weeded out the books they won't cover, this is their "under consideration" pile."

"Amazon sent out another press release this morning, filled with glowing phrases attributed to Jeff Bezos and a whole slew of numbers carefully chosen so that they don't actually correlate with each other at all. Their clear aim is to show how their sales are growing immensely -- the underlying tone of every single Amazon press release dating back to 1995, though what, precisely, is growing hugely has changed often -- and that they have some big, impressive numbers to throw around.

So I wanted to try to quote some of those Amazon declarations, and put them into equation form, to show what it is we know, and what we don't know."