Vintage Links 005: Literary Fame, Publishing Crashes, Breathing, & Research
It’s Friday, September 30, and so I launch into the fifth instalment of my Vintage Links series. It’s been an interesting week clearing the To-Read folder, as i’ve had my first run of posts/articles that were either a) no longer online, or b) now taken over by godawful spam sites that have camped on the former name. The Bizarre, Complicated Formula for Literary Fame (Joshua Rothman for the New Yorker, 2015) Read it at the New Yorker’s Website When you work in a writers centre, you tend to accumulate articles about how various writers get famous or made a giant splash. They’re almost always talking about outliers, because the kinds of folks who get the big coverage are exceptions to the rule, but they’re also the source of information for how publishing works for many new writers. They assume every successful writer’s career trajectory mirrors Stephen Kings, or Dan Browns, or JK Rowlings, or…well, you get the idea. This…isn’t one