paper trail

Mar 12, 2013 @ 12:24:00 am

Kenneth Goldsmith

How many copies need to be sold before a book qualifies as an Amazon “bestseller”? Amazon won’t say, but Publisher’s Weekly did their own calculations and figured out that “a title in Amazon’s top five averages 1,050 print copies sold across all channels, including other retailers, on a typical day. And because the general industry thinking is that Amazon accounts for about 30% of print sales, that means it likely takes around 300 copies per day to reach Amazon’s top five, depending on the day of the week and the time of year.”

"Should people be writing for free?" Gawker's Cord Jefferson weighs in.

Given that the internet is available to us at virtually all times—as writer Alex Mar discovered while doing a residency at the supposedly “internet-free” MacDowell Colony—are we ever able to avoid it?

Poet Kenneth Goldsmith goes on NPR to talk about uncreative writing and plagiarism in literature.

The Paris Review Daily’s Michael McGrath reports from AWP: “Of course one of the painfully ironic realities of a writing conference is the thousands of introverted attendees who travel great distances, get themselves to the city, out of their hotel room, into the bar basement, on the cusp of an encounter, only to divert eye contact at the last minute, feign a phone call or investigate the bottom of their pint glass.”

Filmmaker Danny Boyle tells the Guardian that he’s working on a sequel to Trainspotting based on Porno, Irvine Welsh’s 2002 followup to his hit debut.