Keep this same energy when your groceries go up by 60%

Publishing, as an industry, has never been more lucrative than it is currently, and writers have never been paid less.

Amazon having total market dominance, and taking 80% of royalties (despite contributing nothing to the production process) is obscene.

Amazon famously use books as 'loss leaders' to support their other products/advertising. They can afford to undersell every other retailer, and lose money on books, because they have a trillion-dollar company backing them. They do not care if the author makes no money. They are the only option, and they are a terrible option.

Your arguments in favour of Audible are only demonstrating ignorance on your part. You do not understand what is happening to the publishing industry at wide.

Authors deserve a living wage.

There are anti-monopoly laws for a reason. Audible (Amazon) have complete market dominance.

Currently, if a writer wants to have a non-exclusive contract with Audible, Amazon takes 80% of the profit. If they give Audible exclusive rights, Amazon takes 60%. All of the audiobook production is organised and paid for on the writer's side. Audible is just a digital shelf.

Royalty rates in similar industries are nowhere near this high, nor did they used to be in audiobooks. How is this not extortion? Should we wait until Amazon starts taking 90 percent? Is that when it would get too high for you? Another 10 percent?

It's disgusting business practice, and completely undermines accessibility to the arts. Even an author as big and powerful as Sanderson can't fight it. There are no other platforms to turn to.

>James Baldwin is such an efficient writer, he always seemed to convey exactly what the scene needed and no more

Couldn't disagree more. I know I'm in the minority, but I really struggled to get through even 30 pages of Giovanni's Room.

So many of Baldwin's sentences seemed to spill into the next, and the next. There was constant reiteration and repetition. Like he was always grasping to say something profound. Occasionally he would.

Apparently, he was heavily inspired by the rhetoric of gospel preachers. The whole church-pastor-delivery doesn't sit well with me.

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>Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

I just can't see this as 'efficient writing'. I can understand how other people enjoy it, don't get me wrong. But yeah. Not for me.

That's something I hadn't really considered. A phenomenal book can also put you into a reading slump.

A good friend of mine said when she first read The Bell Jar, every book she picked up afterward rang hollow. There was something so blunt and poetic about Plath's prose that she couldn't quite shake off the voice.

Sally Rooney's prose reads like audio description for the blind.

I'm not really a Sci-fi lover, but I'm thinking about picking this up. I've seen some quotes/snippets and they were surprisingly funny.

Heard great things about Kafka on the Shore. I've not read any Murakami (yet). This book is probably where I'd start.

> it killed my reading for a couple of years

I think it's important to acknowledge that reading books is a more active exercise than consuming other creative media (e.g. films, music, art). In a way, readers and writers are equal partners in the creation of their fiction. A bad book can really knock you out of a great habit.

I studied English up to master's level, and I've gone years without picking up a book. For a while, I saw it as an academic exercise, and it took some time for the joy to come back.

Just skimmed the first few pages of At Swim-Two-Birds. Not sure if it's for me. Though I am currently attempting to write a book myself, and "like listening to someone who talks too much try and explain a dream they had" sounds an awful lot like my writing style. lol.

"The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall" is purple. Again, sounds very pretty. People can write sentences for the sake of them sounding pretty. Don't really get why I'm being downvoted for saying it's purple and sounds nice.

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>The kiss of his memory

ok, a metaphorical memory kiss is a little out there, but I'm definitely following

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>made pictures of love and light

the kiss of his memory made pictures of love? right, so 9 words in we're 2 metaphors deep. sounding a bit twee, but I think I'm with you

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>against the wall.

oh... so now we're throwing those double-stacked metaphors at a metaphorical wall? Trying to see what'll metaphorically stick? The wall of what, exactly? may as well keep it coming. The wall of her mind? A literal wall?

If I read this verbatim in a poem written by a thirteen-year-old, I wouldn't blink twice.

First quote is a little purple for my taste. Super abstract imagery. Though it does sound pretty. Second quote is phenomenal.

Under Milk Wood. Dylan Thomas.

>From where you are, you can hear, in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper, dream of her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samson-syrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass'd and barnacle-breasted flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body...

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>The only sea I saw
Was the seesaw sea
With you riding on it.
Lie down, lie easy.
Let me shipwreck in your thighs.

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I could quote so much of this book. The opening page alone makes me swoon. It's a 'Play for Voices', so best experienced on stage (with a Welsh cast of actors). If you try reading the prose with a Welsh lilt it absolutely sings.

Here's a snippet of the opening performed by Michael Sheen.