1/25/2024
The 33 Project
Hello hello. It’s Thursday! Best day of the week. We spent last weekend in the blistery cold of Minnesnowta and it was lovely. Got to visit with friends, got to freeze our butts off, and managed to peep the US Pond Hockey Championships.
It was special - love you Marth!!
Let’s get into the recs for this week. They are all over the place, but that’s where my mind took me this week…
1/ How hard is it to sell a book? This is bleak.
“McLean’s figures suggested that, of the new books published in the preceding calendar year, about 15 percent sold under twelve copies; 51.4 percent of books, meanwhile, sold between a dozen and 999 units.”
“—according to McLean’s data set, in 2022, less than half a percent of books even cleared 100,000.”
And, perhaps the most brutal graph…
“The fate of a book depends on so many small but consequential decisions that accumulate to ensure it reaches your awareness: the time of year it comes out, the runway it has to get pre-publication endorsements, the way it gets positioned by the publisher. And then, once a book is released, it has to contend with all sorts of other obstacles: The Amazon algorithm. The decline of outlets offering arts coverage. The drop in book sales themselves. In response, our best defence is to read beyond the bestseller lists and the most-hyped titles and support our local independent bookstores. Every book that finds you is a minor miracle.”
2/ A hard, but interesting read. Ordinary People Do Terrible Things.
These perfectly ordinary perpetrators can be found all over history, from Aššur to post-war Hamburg, where the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 returned to their perfectly ordinary lives. They seamlessly re-integrated back into society, at least until they were thoroughly investigated for war crimes 20 years later…Ordinary people did horrific things, and then went right back to being ordinary people, whatever nightmares they might have seen when they closed their eyes at night.
3/ The Times did a fun piece on menus and food trends at restaurants. It was cool to see the variety and similarities across food categories and design.
That’s all for this week. Got some juicy bits for this weekend. Come back and join as a premo to see it all.
Thanks for reading and see you soon!