This morning's Lull Report …

… courtesy of Dave Lull:



…Publishing's new economics:  The Report – Author Earnings.

When Amazon reports that self-published books make up 25% of the top 100 list, the reaction from many is that these are merely the outliers. We hear that authors stand no chance if they self-publish and that most won’t sell more than a dozen copies in their lifetime if they do. (The same people rarely point out that allbestsellers are outliers and that the vast majority of those who go the traditional route are never published at all.) Well, now we have a large enough sample of data to help glimpse the truth. What emerges is, to my knowledge, the clearest public picture to date of what’s happening in this publishing revolution. It’s a lot to absorb, but I believe there’s much here to learn.

… And the winner is: Hatchet Job of the Year.

[A.A.] Gill calls [Morrissey's]  Autobiography “laughably overwrought and overwritten, a litany of retrospective hurt and score-settling” with “a cacophony of jangling, misheard and misused words.” Morrissey is “utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability”: “No teacher is too insignificant not to be humiliated from the heights of success, no slight is too small not to be rehashed with a final, killing esprit d’escalier.”

… Taking a hatchet to the prize: The Hatchet Job of the Year doesn't cut it.

The prize locates itself firmly in the traditions of seductively louche literary London – its co-sponsor is the writers' and artists' local, the Coach and Horses in Soho – in which waspish young men (usually) tell it like it is to old farts, without fear nor favour and certainly without an eye to their literary prospects or next free drink. To underline its devotion to the milieu, it is awarded at one of those properly old-school parties held in tiny rooms with lashings of cheap wine and the promise of poets to snog on the way to the night bus. Brilliant!

… Superfluous men: Nock and Socrates.

Nock’s Memoirs is the figurative equivalent of Socrates drinking the hemlock. But both are suicides that were necessary in light of their worldview. Nock’s Memoirs is his way of getting involved: the only way he could get involved and live true to his principles.

… Ted Gioia on Martin Gardner: The Most Interesting Man in the World.

Even those who think they know Martin Gardner well will learn new things about him in Undiluted Hocus-Pocus. He analyzes political topics that rarely showed up in his books. He outlines his own theory of religion, a peculiar hybrid of belief and disbelief that will probably irritate atheists, Christians, pantheists, and members of every other sect and anti-sect with its fanciful explanations.

 … How Two Men Made a Lady Out of Jazz.

The concert became a watershed moment in the history of music—and introduced the best-loved piece of American concert music, Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." On Wednesday at Town Hall (facing the spot where the 43rd Street entrance of Aeolian Hall once stood), conductor-historian Maurice Peress and bandleader-bassist Vince Giordano are re-creating the entire concert, from "Livery Stable Blues" to "Rhapsody."

… Folio Prize: American authors dominate shortlist for inaugural international award.