The Famous Five Revised
It’s been coming up a lot lately for me and I’m really annoyed by the whole idea. They’ve taken childhood classics and revised them to bring them into the modern world. They’ve done this with Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators and are about to do the same with the Famous Five books.
With the Famous Five books they’re taking out all the old phrases such as, ‘mercy me’ and ‘awful’ swotter’. You can see the article Lashings of editing jolly bad for Blyton books and get more details for yourselves. I don’t understand why everything has to be revised and dumbed down. I think it would be better for the child’s understanding of the world to have them exposed to as much as possible and then explain to them what it used to mean and then relate it to a phrase in today’s language rather than just changing the book. I know they want more money and if they can publish another series of books then that equates to a lot of sales, but my personal belief is that it’s better to publish them as they were. I wouldn’t mind if they proofread them properly and edited out the few typos that are there, though.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on The Famous Five Revised )Miscellaneous musings
I’ve been really struggling to get motivated to do anything tonight. Not terribly good as I have three articles to write. I’ll write something here and hopefully be more motivated tomorrow to get the other two out of the way. I’m just a bit cheesed off as I’ve been following a course of how to get the most out of Facebook. So I’ve been following everything fairly closely, creating a Fan Page, using plenty of swear words and writing some nice html for the Welcome Page until last night when the Welcome Page disappeared. It still hasn’t returned but something I’ve deleted twice has so I’m just going to wait it out for a few days before diving back in again. While I’m waiting I’ll continue with the word games on the discussion board, anyone is welcome to join in.
Varuna
I’d heard of Varuna – Sydney Writers’ Festival Blue Mountains Program and would dearly love to go but I think it’s for serious writers and I don’t consider myself a serious writer, certainly not in the realms of people like Trudi Canavan or Donna Hanson so the best I can do is to get the word out and hope that others get the chance to go. It sounds seriously wonderful. Anyway, the dates are:
Sunday May 16 – Special Children’s Program
Monday May 17 & Tuesday May 18 – Main Program
Australian Publishers Association election result
Small(er) publishers to the fore: a surprise Australian Publishers Association election result. Previously only people from large publishing companies were elected to the presidency of the Australian Publishers Association but this year Stephen May, a psychologist and the founder of Brisbane-based Australian Academic Press ran against Gabrielle Coyne, the CEO of Penguin Australia, and won. It’s a very interesting move and I do wonder how it will affect publishing in Australia. I’m not going to speculate on this, just like I’m not going to speculate on Gabrielle Coyne’s feelings at having lost. It’s going to be one of those ‘watch this space’ times, though.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Being a NYT Bestseller
I came across this Tweet “What’s it like to be a NYT bestseller? http://bit.ly/P3qyU” posted by Writeitsideways and then a couple of minutes later, another by the same person “More on the reality of NYT bestsellers http://bit.ly/2dfPVH”.
Naturally I followed the links, read the articles and followed further links. What I found was author Lynn Viehl giving us the lowdown on the reality of being a New York Times bestseller and the royalty payments that come along with it. She even shows us scanned images of two of her royalty statements and explains them to us so we can see how much money she’s not getting. Bear in mind this is in America with US dollars and therefore things will be slightly different in Australia or any other country, the thing that will remain very similar is the process. It’s complicated and involves something called ‘maths’ which is a concept I have great difficulty with so I won’t explain any of that, you’ll have to go to her articles here and here if you’re interested.
The other thing that occurred to me when I saw the Tweets was how would it be from the books point of view. I happened to speak this out loud and DD said it would be rather confused as it would be split up into so many different ways. Just imagine this, you’ve got the one entity as it’s been printed together than split up into boxes and the boxes shipped to different places and then the boxes opened up and each book taken somewhere different. Just imagine how challenging it would be for one entity to have so many different parts in so many different places! It’s like having brains in each part of your body and when the body is split up it doesn’t die; so you’ve got the different legs and arms being sent to different places but each one can still feel and think. I’d really like to read the story of that book!
I hope the last paragraph wasn’t too confusing. I just have the ideas and sometimes they don’t translate too well to print.
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